


Caught Beneath The Landslide

by itallstartedwithdefenestration



Category: Rope (1948)
Genre: Brief Brandon/Janet, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Pre-Canon, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-28 05:58:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 50,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12599776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itallstartedwithdefenestration/pseuds/itallstartedwithdefenestration
Summary: You can't love a man like Brandon Shaw for as long as Phillip has and expect to come out of it undamaged.





	1. 1939-1943

**Author's Note:**

> Archive warning applies in chapter two. 
> 
> This fic would not be possible without the unbelievable support of Jen. Enough gratitude cannot be expressed towards her patience over the weeks this was written. And I am so beyond excited to finally share this with y'all.
> 
> Title from Champagne Supernova by Oasis.

**_Fall 1939_ **

The philosophy club had taken over the piano room. Phillip’s teacher Mr. Arnold—a thin, slumped man with skin so pale the webbing of his veins was visible in places and pinkish circles around his eyes like he was always just finishing up a good cry—stood for a moment working his lips in the doorway and then said in his mouse voice, “Excuse me—Mr. Cadell—”

Mr. Cadell did not turn. Mr. Arnold cleared his throat—grating sound like someone rubbing small nails together—and said, hardly louder than before, _“Rupert.”_

Rupert Cadell glanced over. He was not a handsome man; there were premature lines about his eyes and something cruel in the twist of his mouth, the small features like someone hiding a secret, but these were all things Phillip would notice in the years to come. Right now all he saw was an older man who was laughing at his admittedly rather pathetic teacher—not outright laughing, but amused, and doing little to hide it. A circle of five or six boys sat around him, watching; among them Phillip recognized his roommate, David. 

“Hello, Maxwell,” said Mr. Cadell. “Can I help you?”

Mr. Arnold took in a deep breath. “I have my eight a.m. class in here,” he said. 

Mr. Cadell made a show of looking at the clock mounted over the blackboard which was covered in various musical notes and mathematical symbols Phillip’s eye tracked for a moment in a vaguely starved way before returning to the group of boys seated on the floor. Overall they looked rich, and clean, and intelligent, as did most everyone who attended this school, and several of them were laughing behind their hands at Mr. Cadell. When he looked back at Mr. Arnold he was smiling pleasantly enough, but it was not kind. 

“Well, I beg your pardon,” he said. “I didn’t even notice the time.” He stood and his group stood too, the philosophy club with their sleeves rolled up non-regulation to their elbows, jackets draped over the backs of chairs, hair a little dusty from the instruments. “Come on, then,” he said, “we can reconvene in my office.”

They walked out clustered around him—David noticed Phillip and shot him a little smile which Phillip was almost too overwhelmed to return because at that exact moment he’d caught sight of another boy—how had he missed him—with sharp cheekbones and a careless mouth that was obviously used to laughing. He was sitting a little ways away from the others and when he stood it was with a leonine grace Phillip envied. He threw his jacket over one shoulder and started out after the rest of the club—then his eyes flicked to Phillip and traveled like he was checking him out, as though Phillip was a woman, and when they looked at each other Phillip felt something, a crack of heat like being struck by lightning in some exposed and unprotected place. 

_He knows,_ Phillip thought, horrified—he couldn’t be sure how this boy knew, but he knew, it was in his eyes, the way his mouth curled further—and then he was out of the door and gone and Phillip’s breathing was staggered and sharp like the philosophy club as a whole had sucked all the air neatly from the room. 

He stared down at his shaking hands, the bitten fingernails still faintly crusted with dirt and the sleeves his aunt had mended only two nights before in her apartment. It was a long time before he could hear Mr. Arnold again, the blood rushing back into his head, his breathing slowing. Eventually he managed to sit, and to take out his sheets and a pencil, but his mind kept skipping back like a bad record to that boy and his sneer and thus on his first day at Somerville Preparatory For Boys Phillip Morgan did not learn a single thing about how to count measures. 

~

“So,” Phillip said, as casually as he could manage, “you’re in the philosophy club?”

He and David were sitting on the great lawn in the front of the arts building, legs crossed, eating lunch. It had surprised Phillip how much freedom they were allowed during meal times. The older boys could leave campus with permission from their housemaster and the younger boys could eat sprawled in the trees if they wanted—at least, that was the way the dean had described it last night during the opening statement made in the assembly center. There was a cafeteria with tables and chairs but Phillip and David had only gone in long enough to grab a couple of hot plates from the assembly line before heading out. Phillip was trying not to think about how David was only sitting with him because Phillip was new, and garnered sympathy. His fingers kept going to the insides of his jacket sleeves and tugging. 

“Yeah,” David said, through a mouthful of potato. “Sorry we were kinda—all in your space,” with a slight gesture that could have meant anything. “Rup—I mean, Mr. Cadell’s really eccentric—” he pronounced it _eck-centric_ — “and sometimes he doesn’t—really consider other people.”

David had been at Somerville for a year now, since the eighth grade. Phillip tried to imagine himself in a philosophy club at fourteen. All he could come up with was an image of himself in overalls with his neck sunburnt, squinting against the harsh sunlight at Kant, fingers dirtying in the pages. 

“It’s okay,” Phillip said. “Mr. Arnold is a space case,” and they both laughed at that. 

Then Phillip said, still casual, “Are you friends with everyone in the club?”

“Uh-huh,” said David, but something in his tone was off. “Yeah, uh. Kenneth Lawrence is new, he’s a year behind the rest of us, but he seems nice…”

There was no accounting that self-satisfied smirk with someone who was not as old as Phillip. “What about that boy with the—” He hesitated. _Confidence_ seemed too needy, and describing his facial features seemed too close to revealing the thing he was sure that boy had already found out. “He was last to leave, he had on a blue tie?”

David’s mouth twisted down, or maybe it was just a trick of the light. “Brandon Shaw,” he said, and even the name sounded cold, powerful. Fit well with the high forehead and the sharp patrician nose. “Yeah, he’s—we have Latin together, too, and I’m pretty sure we were supposed to be in earth science this year but he tested out into biology.” He set his fork on the edge of his tray and picked up a blade of grass to balance upon his knee. “Why?”

Phillip shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. _He just looked right through me, that’s all. He scared the hell out of me, and I don’t want him telling everyone about me._ “He just wasn’t really sitting with the rest of you.”

“Oh, Brandon’s in the club,” David said. “He just prefers talking with Mr. Cadell than the rest of us.” His tone was still off, but Phillip did not have time to dissect it before the bell rang, and David got laboriously to his feet, brushing his pants off and holding his tray nearly over his head. 

“What’s your next class?” he asked. 

Phillip glanced at his schedule. “Uh—Government Studies with Mr. Landry?”

David pointed him in the right direction. “Good luck,” he said. “Every first year has to take that. Most boring class on the entire campus. Well—second most; next semester you’ll be in Economics, and that might be worse.”

“Great,” Phillip said, smiling when David did, and they walked off in opposite directions. Phillip slid his tray on a rack outside the cafeteria before heading to his building, and tried to straighten his shoulders as he walked. He belonged here. He _belonged_ here. 

~

Two nights ago, before leaving his aunt and uncle’s, he’d promised he would call after his first day, rather than make them wait for the delayed gratification of a letter. But the line to use the hall telephone in his dorm was long, and Phillip found himself leaning against the wall, eyes closed. He was more tired than he’d expected to be. 

“Too bad they don’t let us use the phone in the cafeteria,” said a voice at his elbow, and Phillip jumped about ten feet. He was profoundly glad he was no longer carrying any of his books; he would have thrown them and dented the wall and he was positive his aunt and uncle would not be happy about having to pay for property destruction, especially not this early in the year.

When he turned, it got worse. It was Brandon Shaw from the philosophy club, lounging next to him with that same insouciant twist to his mouth from earlier. Again his sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, and his tie was loose at his neck—the top two buttons of his shirt were undone and Phillip was painfully aware of the light pulse at the base of his throat. 

“Uh,” said Phillip, with his own heart somewhere in the vicinity of his lower intestine. Brandon _knew,_ he reminded himself. Brandon was currently the most terrifying person on the planet, and he was standing less than six inches from Phillip’s left elbow, tilted at a casual angle against the wall with his hair coming loose from its gel and falling a little into his eyes. 

“Or the ones in the other dorms, at least,” Brandon said, oblivious to Phillip’s non-answer. “I mean—shit, right?” gesturing at the line which was still five boys away from the phone—the one currently using it curled protectively around the receiver, what looked like chalk dust on his pants—and shaking his head. 

Phillip’s throat was so dry he thought opening his mouth might crack the skin. “Yeah,” he said, finally. 

Brandon was watching him, seemingly oblivious to his one-word answers and the violence with which his heart had started pounding. “You look familiar,” he said. “Do we—”

“Philosophy club,” Phillip muttered. He was trying to figure out exactly how rude it would look if he just walked away right now. Surely Brandon wouldn’t follow him; they didn’t even know each other. But then if Phillip walked away Brandon might take it upon himself to exact revenge by announcing his secret to everyone at breakfast tomorrow—and the underclassmen, for whatever inane reason, had to eat together in the cafeteria every morning. Juniors and seniors got to go off campus again for their breakfasts; halfway through music Phillip had glanced out the window and seen several of them sauntering across the lawn from the direction of town with jam at the corners of their mouths and sleepy expressions. 

The corner of Brandon’s mouth twitched. “Oh, right,” he said. “One of Arnold’s music classes.” He shifted his weight a little away from the wall. “I took him last year. He’s kind of—” He circled his finger at his temple. “What do you play?”

Phillip noticed that Brandon, unlike David, was not apologizing for the club having taken up the room. “Piano,” he said, slowly. He scratched at the inside of his wrist and tried not to tug on his sleeves. 

Something flickered in Brandon’s eyes, gone too fast for Phillip to pick up what it was. “I can’t play anything,” he said. It sounded cheerful. “I took that class because I needed an elective. Of course then Rupert came halfway through the first semester to replace Simmons who had died and then the philosophy club got started and my elective was filled—”

“Do you not—take philosophy?” Phillip asked. In spite of the rush of fear he’d felt upon first seeing Brandon standing close enough to touch, Brandon who had known his secret, somehow, at first glance, he could feel himself warming up a little to conversation. At his old school the other boys hadn’t been unfriendly, exactly, but they hadn’t wanted to be there, either. Most took half-days and Phillip didn’t see them after lunch except maybe once a week. If he’d tried to start a conversation, if he’d offered a friendly smile across the room, it hadn’t gone returned, and eventually Phillip had fallen into the habit of no longer attempting anything. He didn’t exactly go out of his way to socialize when he didn’t have to, most of the time, but it was—pleasant, to have someone who wouldn’t turn away at the first sign of Phillip opening his mouth. 

Also, the fact that Brandon wasn’t yelling the truth to the entire hall, which was slowly emptying out as the phone got closer. 

“It’s only available after sophomore year,” Brandon said, and there was that look again, lingering so that Phillip could recognize it as a sort of tense jealousy. “So just one more year—but in the meantime, the club.” He tilted his head a little the other way. “Do you like philosophy?”

Belatedly Phillip recognized that Brandon’s question served the double purpose of also being an invitation. Maybe he didn’t know Phillip’s secret after all. Maybe Phillip was just being paranoid—

“It’s all right,” Phillip said, and shrugged. Brandon snorted.

“Well, it meets twice a week, every week,” he said. “Usually in Rupert’s office, but this morning it was so nice out, and the music room affords a much better view of the campus grounds—”

It was still nowhere near an apology. Not that Phillip thought Brandon especially owed him one. 

“I wouldn’t be intruding?” Phillip asked. _Also, do we all have to call him Rupert?_ It seemed like a bit of a stretch. He remembered David’s voice, his face, when he’d said Brandon preferred talking to Mr. Cadell than to the others…

Brandon was making a face like Phillip was maybe a little slow. “I’m recruiting you,” he said, “and it’s the first day of school, and you’re new, so no, it’s not intruding. It’s just an invitation.” He paused, glancing over at the boy on the phone—two away from Phillip now—and leaned in a little. “Do they not have invitations… y’know, where you’re from?”

Phillip shook his head like to clear it. “Wait, what?”

Brandon lifted his eyebrows. “Well,” he said, barely above a whisper, “aren’t you poor?”

So much for Phillip just being paranoid. He felt like the bottom half of his stomach had dropped clean onto the floor. Like if he looked down right now he’d be standing in a sticky mess of blood and half-digested food. It wasn’t the secret he’d thought Brandon knew, yet somehow this was worse. He closed his eyes for a moment; against his will his fingers found the insides of his sleeves yet again and gave a violent tug, thumbs rubbing against the slightly uneven stitching. “What—” He cleared his throat. Opened his eyes. Beside him Brandon was watching his face with a carefully neutral expression—but Phillip could see that he knew. It was in the twist of his mouth. The glimmer of amusement and something like pride in his eyes. What a shit. No wonder David had hesitated before calling this boy his friend. Phillip had only been speaking to him for about ten minutes and already he was pretty sure he wanted nothing else to do with him for the rest of his life. 

The boy in front of him was up now. He dialed his number while Phillip’s mind stalled like a bad car engine; a second later he was stepping away, shrugging. “Have at it,” he said, and Phillip stumbled forward, relieved for the distraction of cold metal and plastic. He could feel Brandon’s eyes on him as his trembling fingers dialed his aunt and uncle’s number, the way his gaze tracked Phillip as he tried to turn his body away for several unsuccessful seconds. When his aunt picked up he relented and leaned against the wall, back to Brandon. He tried to keep the conversation as short as possible— _yes, I’m fine; yes, I’m enjoying my classes; yes, his name’s David; no, not really, I don’t know any of them well enough yet to say that_ —but even so, by the time he hung up he was covered in a light sheen of sweat that he knew had nothing to do with the sun setting and stretching golden dust-flecked rays through the glass windows on the doors leading outside. 

He turned to go. Brandon fell into step beside him. 

“Don’t you have a phone call to make?” he asked, testily, and not entirely whispering. 

Brandon laughed. It was an odd, almost manic sound, a bright animal noise just a little too sharp to be happy. 

“I’m okay,” he said. 

“Did you just—fake that you needed to call someone so that you could talk to me?” 

Brandon shrugged. “Maybe.”

Phillip huffed. They were at the stairs which led to the boys’ rooms themselves, and Phillip stopped, and leaned against the banister. No way was he going to let Brandon know which room he and David shared. 

“You don’t even know me,” he said. Which wasn’t really anything of an argument at all.

Brandon’s eyes did not leave his face. It felt like he was testing Phillip, like he was watching for some kind of reaction. Playing a game Phillip was aware he would not win. It was a very odd thing to feel about someone he’d known for less than half an hour. Despite the fact that Brandon had not left his mind since he’d first seen him this morning. 

“How… do you know?” he asked at length, giving up. Tugging harder on his sleeves; watching Brandon watch him do it. 

Brandon’s arms were folded across his chest. “Your sleeves don’t all the way cover your wrists,” he said, and Phillip’s eyes shot down—no, they didn’t, but he hadn’t even noticed until Brandon pointed it out. “You’re tan—rich boys don’t spend a lot of time outdoors, or anyway they don’t here. And—” his mouth twitched, he reached forward, he took—fuck, he _took Phillip’s hand,_ what was he _doing,_ they didn’t even _know_ each other—and traced a brief pattern across his fingernails, the bitten-in beds still crusted with dirt, before dropping it and stepping back, thankfully before anyone came in and saw them. “Those are just a bit—unclean,” he said. “For someone who’s supposed to just stay inside all day playing piano and reading Chaucer.”

Phillip closed his eyes again. This wasn’t happening. 

“This isn’t happening,” he said. 

“You don’t have to worry,” Brandon told him. “I won’t tell anyone.”

Phillip snorted. “Yeah, right,” he said. He could kiss Somerville goodbye, that was for sure. He might as well go upstairs now and start packing. 

“I won’t!” Brandon said. He was smiling in a way that made the whole thing seem like it was a grand joke. “I swear.” 

“What’s the catch,” Phillip didn’t ask, because he already knew there was one. 

Brandon stuck his thumbs through his belt loops. Lifted his eyebrows. “Come to the club meeting on Friday,” he said. “David can take you to Rupert’s office when it’s time.” He seemed—Phillip didn’t know the word for it, but he seemed earnest in a way that did not entirely go with his personality, or at least what little Phillip had gleaned from it so far. 

“I have my class right then, remember,” Phillip said, a little dry—if it wasn’t for that stupid class, he and Brandon wouldn’t have even seen each other this morning. 

“So skip,” Brandon said. For a moment his mouth twitched as though laughing at some private joke. “Arnold literally wouldn’t notice if half the class didn’t show. Rupert says he gets his paychecks for teaching air every month.” Still with that uncharacteristic openness, slightly leaning his body forward. Other boys were trickling in through the sun-grazed door, but Brandon did not take his eyes off Phillip once. He was rocking back a little on his heels and staring at Phillip with an intensity Phillip had never seen before and it was all too much, and too easy to just sigh, and throw up his hands. 

“Fine,” he said. He could not believe he was being blackmailed like this. It was only his first day. “Fine, I’ll come to the, the stupid club meeting. Once. _Once.”_

Brandon grinned. “Great,” he said. When he clapped Phillip on the shoulder there was a brief shocking feeling that ran through him like heat lightning. As he sauntered up the stairs Phillip leaned more of his weight upon the banister and pressed his forehead into his palm. He wondered if Brandon was telling the truth. If Brandon really wouldn’t tell anyone about him. 

As if it were merely an afterthought, Brandon paused halfway up the steps, turned his body back towards Phillip. “I’m Brandon Shaw, by the way,” he called. 

Phillip looked up through his fingers, feeling the mess of his curls begin to fall over their tips. “Phillip,” he called back. “Phillip Morgan.”

Brandon smiled. It completely changed his face; Phillip’s breath was for a moment caught in his chest. 

“Nice to meet you, Phillip,” Brandon said. “Looking forward to Friday,” and then he turned away again and was gone into the series of rooms above. 

Phillip tugged harder on his stupid, short sleeve. His _first day._

~

David didn’t seem overly concerned when Phillip told him; Phillip couldn’t decide if that was a good or bad thing. “He doesn’t even know me,” he said. 

“That’s just Brandon,” David said. He was frowning up at the ceiling, laying on top of his covers in pajamas just a bit too big for him, his arms folded across his chest like one of those mummified corpses in the pyramids. “He’s—a lot to take in.” 

“Is it really okay if I come?” 

“It’s a club,” David pointed out, “and we’re a boarding school, not a dictatorship.”

Phillip sighed. “Fair point,” he said, and then: “What do you guys even do?”

David’s shoulders lifted and fell against the sheets. “Mr. Cadell talks about philosophy,” he said. “Mostly, uh—Nietzsche, you know, the guy with the whole, the concept of the superman—” His frown deepened. “We get to talk about other stuff too, though, if that sounds boring. Like, there was one boy last year, he graduated, but he brought comics a lot, and uh, and Mr. Cadell likes to encourage creativity, so people sometimes tell stories…” He turned his head to Phillip, who was crawling into bed himself. “Obviously, you don’t have to come, but it’s not so bad. I did it all last year and I’m pretty sure I’m gonna keep doing it this year—I even kinda missed it during the summer.”

Phillip’s mind was on the way Mr. Cadell had not-quite-sneered at Mr. Arnold. How the boys in the club—Kenneth and David and Brandon and the others—had tracked his movements so diligently. Almost worshipful. _Rupert says he gets his paychecks for teaching air…_

“I’ll be there,” he said. “Just—will you take me, Friday morning? I have no idea where Mr. Cadell’s office is.”

David smiled. “Absolutely.”

~

The club had already assembled by the time David and Phillip arrived on Friday morning—a blond boy Phillip sort of remembered from Monday, and a tall dark-haired boy with eyes like a bloodhound’s, and—Brandon. Sitting there beside Mr. Cadell’s desk with his ankle crossed over the opposite knee, twirling a pen between his fingers, that arrogant twist to his mouth, eyes cast restlessly about the room. When Phillip and David walked in he sat up a little straighter, and his smile softened momentarily into something more genuine—or maybe that was just Phillip’s imagination. 

“You’re late,” he said, as David sat in one of the empty chairs—they were arranged in a circle around the office—and gestured at Phillip to do the same. The blond boy offered him a tentative smile which he returned, grateful—in spite of David’s reassurances Phillip had still been nervous about coming all week. His sleeves were still too short, in spite of all the tugging he’d been doing. 

“Mr. Cadell isn’t even here,” David said. 

Brandon ignored this in favor of turning to Phillip. “Glad to see you’re here,” he said. As though it had been Phillip’s idea. But all Phillip said was:

“Yeah. Thanks for inviting me,” because after all, Brandon knew. 

“This is Kenneth Lawrence,” Brandon said, gesturing to the boy at Phillip’s right. “He’s just a baby,” and Phillip remembered David mentioning he was in eighth grade. The others were laughing a little, including Kenneth in a small, shy way. “David you know… and that’s Jim Cooke—” gesturing at the dark-haired boy—“grade above the rest of us, thinks he’s special.”

More laughter (Jim’s sad bloodhound eyes lifted a little at their corners). But Phillip noticed the way Brandon’s mouth tightened, and he wondered how much of the comment was actually a joke to him. 

But he didn’t have much time to think about it because the door was opening, and Rupert Cadell was walking into the room with that same self-important stride he’d taken out of Mr. Arnold’s room five days previous. He, Jim, and Kenneth stood—at least, he did, Jim and Kenneth both half-lifted themselves from their chairs and then sat quickly back down as though shot. Mr. Cadell raised an eyebrow in their direction; then he caught sight of Phillip and the eyebrow went up further. 

“We don’t need to recognize such formalities here,” he said. “My one rule is that no one in this club has to stand up when I walk in.” 

Phillip smoothed his hands down the fronts of his thighs as he sat, mostly trying to ignore the sweat pooling under his arms. Mr. Cadell was watching him like he was being scrutinized. If Mr. Cadell knew too Phillip thought he’d just jump out the window and run. Maybe he could make it to the city proper and get lost in the theater district before anyone caught him…

“T-This is Phillip M-Morgan, Rupert,” Brandon said. The stutter in his voice was unmistakable and Phillip felt the same measure of surprise as he had upon seeing that strangely eager expression in the dorm. He glanced over but Brandon didn’t look anything like embarrassed; in fact he was sitting up straighter, both feet on the floor, the lazy commanding tilt to his posture gone and replaced by something—Phillip couldn’t place what, nor why it made him feel briefly uneasy—

“Phillip Morgan,” Mr. Cadell repeated. He was still standing at the door and Phillip wondered why he didn’t just come all the way in so they could stop craning their necks to watch him. “Any relation to the Morgans in Boston?”

“N—yeah,” Phillip said, a hasty correction that lifted brief color to his cheeks. He hoped no one noticed. He couldn’t quite bear to look over at Brandon after he said it because he knew Brandon would have noticed, and he knew Brandon knew he was lying, anyway. “Yeah, uh—distant relations. Cousins of cousins, I think.” 

Mr. Cadell was not-quite smiling. There were still traces of that earlier scrutiny and Phillip didn’t think he knew _precisely_ but overall it had the feeling of being on the examination table at the doctor’s. “Well,” he said, after what felt like several hours, “how did you find our little club?”

David and Brandon both laughed, some inside joke.

“Brandon invited me,” Phillip said, and Mr. Cadell’s eyes cut to him. He started walking forward with his hands in his pockets and simultaneously as he kicked the door shut with one shoe the clock ticked onto eight o’clock precisely. Phillip thought for a moment of Mr. Arnold. He’d be calling role right now, pausing at Phillip’s name, tilting his shoulders up, marking him absent… The thought did not make Phillip feel as guilty as he thought it should and he didn’t know what to do with that. 

“Recruiting already, Brandon?” Mr. Cadell asked. “So early in the year?”

“On the f-first day,” Brandon said. 

“I told him about it too,” David blurted, and Brandon’s mouth went tight at the corners. 

“It isn’t a contest, you shi—”

“Language, Brandon,” Mr. Cadell said mildly. But it didn’t sound like he meant it. To Phillip he said: 

“Do you study philosophy?” 

“No,” Phillip said, and added, “sir,” which for some reason made Mr. Cadell smile. 

“Well,” he said, “our club is for everyone, even beginners,” which made David and Brandon laugh again. The exclusivity of it made Phillip uneasy in the same way as Brandon’s posture. 

He glanced around the room rather than respond. It was small, narrow; later Phillip would learn the word ‘claustrophobic’ and Mr. Cadell’s room would come to his mind first, though at the time he could not have pinpointed why its sheer high walls and cluttered walkways made him itch. There were four high windows grown over with mildew in the corners and clustered by long emerald vines which grew from pots at their sills. Mr. Cadell’s desk had a single Tiffany lamp at one corner and was full of various and sundry papers covered in writing… and along the walls, on the floor, even stacked at the edge of his desk beside the papers, were books. Phillip’s eyes flicked over their authors—Kant, Heidegger, Sartre, Locke. On the bottom shelf there was a whole row dedicated entirely to Nietzsche. Several copies of the same book; Phillip supposed they were updated editions. 

By this point he had reached his desk and sat behind it. Phillip watched Brandon twist his chair a little so he could see Mr. Cadell better. The look on his face reminded Phillip vaguely of how his parents had looked during Sunday Mass. 

“Well,” said Mr. Cadell, after what felt like a long moment. “Shall we begin?”

Later, Phillip could not have said what they discussed—in part because philosophy was not something he was used to nor even particularly interested in, but largely because his attention was drawn for the most part to Brandon Shaw, who shifted in his chair and leaned against Mr. Cadell’s desk and laughed a shade too loudly and led most of the discussions with such intensity that even David—who seemed prone to want to argue with Brandon on most points—fell silent after a time and just listened. And Mr. Cadell was quiet, watching Brandon too, encouraging him, occasionally suggesting something that set him off on yet another tangent. When the bell rang they all jumped. Phillip’s hand found his sleeve. 

“W-well,” Brandon said, “same t-time next Monday?”

“Of course,” Mr. Cadell said. “Although perhaps you should allow someone else a chance to speak.” 

Brandon’s cheeks were flushed, but Phillip did not think it was from embarrassment; indeed he doubted anything could embarrass Brandon at all. He stood up, long stretch of limbs from the chair, didn’t answer; folded his jacket over his arm, walked over to where Phillip stood, uncertain, by the door. 

“Where’s your next class?” he asked. Phillip told him, and Brandon’s mouth twitched. “Mine’s in the same building,” he said, “I’ll walk with you.”

Outside, it was warm, faint breeze stirring the leaves which were golden with sunlight. Brandon hitched his bag higher over his shoulder and Phillip watched him out of the corners of his eyes feeling suspicious and tight in the chest. 

“What did you think?” Brandon asked, after less than a minute. 

Phillip’s mouth twitched. “It’s all right,” he said. “You certainly enjoy hearing yourself talk, though.”

Brandon glared at him. It was a little derisive, like Phillip was missing the bigger picture. “Who else is gonna give an opinion that matters?” he asked. “David?” and then he laughed, the idea amusing him. “R-Rupert doesn’t mind when I talk,” he added after a moment, defensive. 

_I don’t mind either,_ Phillip wanted to say, but he knew how it would sound out loud. He tugged on his sleeve instead, and Brandon’s eyes tracked the movement. 

“You should have your clothes tailored,” he said. 

Phillip flushed. In the warmth of the day it made his skin uncomfortable and he pulled at his collar. “Is it always like that?” he asked, in lieu of answering. “The club, I mean. Do you always have discussions like that?”

Brandon shook his head. “Not always,” he said. Then he flashed Phillip a grin: “Sometimes it’s much, much worse,” and this time when he laughed Phillip joined him. The catch of sunlight in his smile was infectious; Phillip felt blinded by everything about him. 

They were passing the registrar’s office. Phillip paused outside the building; Brandon drew up beside him.

“What do you do with the rest of your week during first period?” Phillip asked. “When you aren’t in the club?”

“Study hall,” Brandon said. He folded his arms across his chest. “I’m sure you could get Arnold to agree to let you come to his class three times a week instead of five, if you wanted. He’s more accommodating to requests like that if you’re talented.”

There was a faint bite in his voice Phillip thought it would be better to ignore. He glanced at his watch, then said:

“Just a second,” to Brandon, and started up the stairs. When he glanced back Brandon was leaning against the railing with that same laconic tilt to his spine from the dorm five days previous and his hair blown a bit over the crest of his forehead by the wind. Phillip felt a little shiver he could not tamp down and walked inside the glass doors to the registrar’s desk. A moment later he was requesting a change of schedule form. 

**_Winter 1941_ **

“Does anyone know what the assembly is even for?”

“They’re trying to ensure we’ll fail our exams, since we’re so close to the end and they know we need to study.” The last word spit like poison in the general direction of the science teacher Mr. Edgeworth, who frowned, made an impatient gesture at the door to the auditorium. 

“Just go inside, Mr. Shaw,” he said, “and try to be quiet.”

Phillip nudged at Brandon’s shoulder with his own, a sort of go on gesture he knew Brandon would not take well nor even pay attention to unless it was coming from him. And indeed after a few seconds Brandon huffed and rolled his eyes and walked into the dim interior of the room. The way his fingers twitched at his side meant he wanted a cigarette. They slid into a row near the back and sat, side by side, on the dust-covered cushioned seats, armrest up between them. The auditorium was new but the seats had been imported from an abandoned and decaying theater from the late nineteenth century across town; most of the time during assemblies Phillip had the feeling of getting ready to watch a play. 

Wordlessly as the other students got comfortable around them Phillip pulled his own pack of Lucky Strikes from inside his jacket and handed it to Brandon who immediately opened the top and made like to shake one into his palm. 

“Not here,” Phillip hissed. “You want Rupert to catch you?”

“Rupert wouldn’t c-care,” Brandon whispered back, tapping the edge of the pack on his thigh. 

“Rupert would absolutely care if it was in public with his job on the line,” Phillip said. Along with the usual twinges of annoyance and jealousy that generally accompanied any and all mentions of Rupert around Brandon Phillip felt exasperated; they were his cigarettes, too, and he’d be in just as much trouble. Brandon didn’t think most of the time. He just acted. Phillip would say he didn’t know why he’d put up with him for so long now, except even to himself that would be a lie. 

Brandon rolled his eyes and sighed very soft; his fingers flexed again. “You’re so boring,” he muttered, but he put the cigarettes up anyway, sliding them into his own jacket instead of handing them back to Phillip. 

“Hey—”

“For safekeeping,” Brandon said, and grinned. It was the grin that, as usual, disarmed Phillip; often in the past two years he found himself shocked by how much he had overlooked when it came to Brandon and his smiles. It had been years since Brandon had ferreted out the truth of his upbringing, but sometimes Phillip wondered if he knew the other secret, the one he’d originally been so keen on keeping to himself; if Brandon used his charm on Phillip in particular because he’d figured him out all the way, and not just partially. 

But it didn’t really matter. Brandon had done exactly what he’d promised, and kept the one secret from their friends, even from Rupert, and Phillip supposed he couldn’t ask for much else. 

David dropped in on Brandon’s other side, flung an arm around his shoulder. His cheeks were flushed in a way that meant he’d run from the other side of campus to get here; his tie was askew and his golden curls fell slightly damp in the heat from the radiators and as he undid the scarf from around his neck he said, a shade too loud even in the growing din:

“Did you hear about what happened?” His voice was sharp with excitement. Phillip watched Brandon’s face change; his mouth went tight at the corners. As he turned slightly away from Phillip to include David in the conversation he twisted his shoulders so that David’s hand would fall onto the armrest between their seats. But David did not seem to notice. 

“No,” Brandon said, and his hand flexed. “What’s the news? Why are they wasting our goddamn time in here?”

“It’s something to do with the war,” David mock-whispered. “Apparently Roosevelt made some kind of an announcement or something on the radio.”

“So you don’t actually know anything,” Brandon said, irritated. 

“Well, I mean, uh, no, but—”

“So shut up, would you, so we can listen.” Brandon plunged back against his seat, which exhaled a faint cloud of dust. He was so easily riled; Phillip knew he couldn’t bear that David had found out something, anything, no matter how small, before he had. His hand was tapping out an even rhythm against the seat now and Phillip had a feeling that midway through the lecture Brandon would be heading out to smoke half the pack under the tree out by the lake, with dirty snow under his boots and his breath crackling in the air. It was so predictable and yet Phillip as always felt the unmistakable desire to join him when he left. It was like the excitement of the plunge over a rollercoaster; knowing it was coming, yet anticipating it all the same with your chest and your stomach and everything else all twisted up in knots. 

David shot him a look he either didn’t notice or didn’t care to acknowledge. Then he leaned over Brandon and struck up a tense, awkward conversation with Phillip about the Latin III midterm until Kenneth showed up. 

“What’s going on, guys?” Kenneth asked, plunging into a seat in the row behind them and ignoring the rest of the sophomore class heading up farther into the auditorium. 

“We don’t know,” Phillip said, before David could start up again. Beside him he saw Brandon’s mouth twitch and he felt another pleasant thrill that meant he’d done the right thing. 

Kenneth leaned against the back of his seat. His coat sleeve was cold against Phillip’s neck. “I hope it’s not too long,” he said, “Merrill’s really grilling us this year for our exam on adjectives—”

“Excuse me, young men.” There was a screech of feedback as Dean Francis tapped the microphone upon the stage. Behind him in the shadows Phillip saw Rupert who was sitting with the other teachers flinch. “May I have your attention? I have to bring—I’m sorry, but I must be the bearer of some very, some horrible news to you all.”

“I _told_ you it’s the war,” David whispered. Brandon rolled his eyes and sighed, loud enough that Matthew Arthur on David’s other side turned to shush him. 

“Tell Kentley to shut up, he’s the one who—”

“Brandon,” Phillip murmured, and Brandon’s hand flexed hard against his jacket, but he shut his mouth. On stage, Dean Francis’ throat was working like he couldn’t figure out how to say what he wanted, and something cold fell in a rush that had nothing to do with Kenneth’s sleeve down Phillip’s spine. 

He did not hear much after _war with Japan._ Around him he could hear varied forms of reaction. Jim Cooke’s face had drained of all color, and Phillip remembered suddenly hearing that Jim had an older brother who would likely be drafted as he was out of school and did not work. David was saying something but Phillip was staring at his hands, shaking, in his lap. In spite of himself he began to tug at his sleeves. Beside him Brandon shifted, reached into his jacket, pulled out the carton. A moment later he was getting up and touching Phillip’s shoulder and Phillip as he’d known he would simply followed him out, ignoring Kenneth and David both. And he thought it was a mark of the shock of the times that no teachers came forward on stage to stop them. 

Outside the temperature had dropped a few degrees; the air was chilled and hollow and there was more snow falling, though faintly, dusting the branches on the trees as Phillip and Brandon made their way across the quad to the lake. It was frozen over and they sat at one of the benches beside it, feet in the snow and the dead grass beneath, cold metal slick underneath. Brandon withdrew two cigarettes and handed the carton back to Phillip who pocketed it before taking the cigarette Brandon proffered. He stuck it in his mouth, leaned forward a little. When Brandon lit it he cupped one long hand around its end to keep the flame from blowing out. His pinky brushed the side of Phillip’s face, cold dry skin. For a moment they sat there, a little in each other’s space, Brandon lighting his own cigarette without really moving. In the still morning air with the sky hanging around them gray and pressing down Phillip felt like they were the last two people on earth. Like for a moment nothing else mattered except Brandon and the glowing ember on his cigarette and the pallid skin stretched over his face and the bruised shadows beneath his eyes where he did not sleep…

Then Brandon turned away and said, “I’m glad it’s not going to be you.”

Phillip exhaled a cloud of sickly gray smoke into the wan yellow light of the sun. “What?”

“In the w-war,” Brandon said. Even frozen the lake gave his voice an odd echoing effect, surreal and unworldly. “You won’t have to go, you won’t get the draft.”

“Well, none of us will—”

“Would you l-let me finish, you s-shit?” Brandon’s stutter became more pronounced around Rupert, or when he was frustrated, or nervous. Phillip had at one time thought it might also when he was tired, except they’d shared a dorm room since sophomore year, and when Brandon was tired his voice only dragged a little, soft country drawl he worked hard to keep clipped while aware of himself. 

“Sorry, Brandon,” Phillip murmured, placating. It was so easy to rile him up, but it was easier still to bring him down. He was predictable enough to be boring if he’d been anyone else. 

Brandon breathed out. His cigarette was nearing its end; he’d always been a fast smoker. “I meant, all I meant was that _you_ —you specifically, you won’t have to go. Because y-you’re not…” He hesitated. It was so unlike him that Phillip glanced over, but Brandon was staring straight ahead, out over the lake to the chemistry building, and the tree line beyond. “You aren’t on your parents’ farm anymore,” he said, finally, and instinct had Phillip glance around, sharp, but they were still alone. “You can defer and go to college with the rest of us.”

Phillip stubbed his cigarette out on the bench despite not being halfway through with it, pulled on his coat sleeves. They didn’t talk about it much, oddly it was like the one boundary Brandon knew not to push, but it still felt like being exposed naked when Brandon did bring it up, evisceration of his whole self onto the floor, like that first day in the dorms, freshman year, in the phone line…

Yet Phillip knew Brandon well enough now to understand he didn’t mean anything malicious by it. That what Brandon was trying to say, what he wouldn’t ever actually admit out loud, was that he was glad Phillip was going to stay here. That they were going to Columbia together like they’d been planning. That their annual trips to the Shaw farm in Connecticut wouldn’t suddenly be cut short. That they’d room together another five years. Phillip knew without any sort of self-centeredness that he was the only one of their friends who Brandon could actually talk to, not just on a superficial level about philosophy or in that way he did when he needed to charm something out of someone but really, actually _talk,_ and he knew in some way he didn’t fully understand that Brandon needed that. Brandon needed him here, and present, and listening. It was a little overwhelming, Brandon’s intensity coupled with that feeling. But Phillip could not truthfully say he hated it. 

“Yeah,” he said, watching their thighs fall less than an inch apart where they each had their ankles crossed over their knees. “That’s really good.”

~

Eventually they had smoked through half the pack and by that point the snow had ceased falling and so they got up—Brandon stretching out various little kinks in his neck and arms twisting his wrists—and started back for the school proper. As they walked the sun cast little weak attempts at warmth over the ground and against their clothes. It didn’t feel like the country was at war. It didn’t feel like much of anything. 

“I’m glad you aren’t going, either,” Phillip said, when they were nearly at the auditorium where the boys were standing in various huddled groups looking either scared or like they were pretending not to be. 

Brandon did not answer, but he smiled, a small secret thing tucked into his cheek, and looked briefly at Phillip from the corners of his eyes. Then they were accosted by Kenneth and David whose eyes were red and a little damp. 

“Classes have been cancelled for the rest of the day,” David said. “Rupert wants us to meet in his office.” Then he frowned. “Stand here for a second, though. You both reek of smoke.”

Brandon looked at Phillip again and this time they both burst out laughing, which made Kenneth smile uncertainly. But David was still frowning, glancing between them. Of their friends he was the only one who actively did not smoke nor approve of it; often he cited the school rule book which stated cigarettes were restricted on campus, which always made Brandon retort that there wasn’t a single boy at the school who didn’t smoke, or who didn’t know someone who did. It was an argument old enough by now that they hardly had to have it out loud anymore. Yet David still insisted on pushing his point… as though by now he did not understand that Brandon didn’t listen to anyone… and there was something else in the way he was looking at them, a sort of searching…

Kenneth said, “I think they’re fine,” and he said, “I think we should go in before Rupert gets mad,” and David shrugged, turning away. 

“Wish _he_ could get drafted,” Brandon muttered into Phillip’s ear as they walked, his breath warm against the crest of half-frozen skin. “Then we wouldn’t have to put up with his shit anymore,” and Phillip snorted, knocking his elbow against Brandon’s: _don’t say things like that,_ even though he knew Brandon was joking. 

~

Rupert’s office plants were all dead, crawling sulfuric yellow things. He let them die like that every winter, and the room which was small and even more cramped than it had been Phillip’s freshman year inevitably smelled of rot by the time the school reopened for the spring semester. Then the club—except Brandon, who just sat and pretended to give orders—cleaned the pots out and planted fresh seeds. Phillip didn’t understand the point, but then he didn’t understand most things Rupert said or did. The five of them—including Rupert; Jim Cooke had dropped out the year previous so he could focus on studying—sat in their usual semicircle of chairs. Rupert was quiet. The radiator in the corner of the room groaned and rattled with a heavy clicking noise. 

At length Rupert got up and began to pace, which often he did when he was thinking very hard about something. “You boys are lucky,” he said. “You’re all what, sixteen, seventeen—couple years until some of you go off to college, you’re not gonna get drafted.”

“Yeah,” David said, his voice a shade too loud again, “who would’ve ever thought college would end up as an escape?” He pronounced it _eck-scape,_ he’d always had trouble with words like that, and Phillip knew Brandon had flinched without having to look over. 

“I participated in the Great War,” Rupert said. “That’s where I found my philosophy.”

He held up his personal copy of _Thus Spoke Zarathustra,_ the only one in the room none of them were allowed to touch. It was worn at the spine and the pages were yellowed along their edges. The cover was bent so far back in the center it was nearly cracked off. Brandon leaned forward a little like to see better, and the eagerness on his face was undisguised, an open almost broken thing Phillip couldn’t really bear to look at. “You mean the concept of—”

“The concept of the superman, yes,” Rupert said. _“Übermensch._ I lay in the tent at night breathing through a cloth wrapped around my face in case the gas came too close and I read this by moonlight only—” he was laughing a little; he was an intriguing person, Phillip thought perhaps he’d have liked him more in another life wherein he wasn’t so resentful of Rupert’s hold over Brandon—“And I came to the conclusion that there are men who are greater than other men in the whole, in the sum of things. Because otherwise how could I have justified it to myself, what I did there?” 

They were all quiet. Prior to this Rupert hadn’t spoken much of the war; they all knew he’d fought, and that his knee was bad, that it hurt worse in winter, so that sometimes he limped and had to use a cane which he kept propped up in the corner of his office. But there had been no elaborations and Phillip felt in spite of himself a certain curiosity, and he thought of how now their lives were bookended by war… 

Rupert said, “In the course of the world, there have been several cleansings; humans are just the first beings intelligent enough to generate their own. And it is called war and it is masked by saying that one side kills the other so that their country can go on as it has been, or for religion or for sex—” Kenneth’s mouth twitched—“but the fact is that what I learned, reading Nietzsche in the dead still nights in Europe, is that war is the cleansing of the inferior, who cannot fight, and the rise of the superior, who have the correct tools and the proper minds and who can.” 

Brandon, who was sitting in his chair backwards, had leaned forward so far he was nearly falling. There was a light in his eyes, interest undisguised, and he said, “Are you s-saying that m-murder is, is all right?”

Rupert hesitated. Phillip heard the _yes_ in his silence as loud as if he’d spoken it. 

“Superiority and inferiority dictate different levels of intelligence, you understand,” he said, finally. “So what it boils down to is: do you want superior or inferior people to make up the world and its population?” He was standing now, leaning against his desk, with his knees crossed and that familiar little smile, like he knew things they didn’t, things he might or might not tell them, as he so deigned. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you that murder is _all right,_ as you put it, Brandon, because the board of trustees would probably have my head—” 

They all laughed at that. 

“—but in certain cases…” He shrugged. “It seems to me that the superior being, the superman, has a right, has certain rights that other men may not. And that murder in his case may be nothing more than a privilege he has acquired simply by being who he is.”

“The cl-cleansing,” Brandon said. His hands where they rested on the back of his chair were trembling. 

Rupert looked at him. “Yes,” he said, a little slower than before. “Exactly.”

They were all quiet for a moment. Then softly David said, “Well, shit,” and Kenneth broke into nervous laughter that seemed to dissipate the slight film of tension in the room like a soap bubble. But Phillip was watching Brandon, and Brandon was rubbing at his mouth with his thumb, which meant he was thinking, and thinking hard, and not about something entirely moral. Staring at Rupert and thinking with his leg jittering slightly against the side of the chair. 

Another cold something trickled down the back of Phillip’s neck. In another minute Rupert was sitting down in his chair and asking if any of the boys had stories they’d heard— _unrelated to war or murder, we have to loosen this discussion, Christ_ —and Brandon was opening his mouth to, predictably, tell the story of the bride in the chest, and Phillip pushed whatever thought had tried to emerge away like water sloughing off a moored ship and focused on the soft cadence of Brandon’s voice. 

~

By the time they emerged for the day from school it was nearing dusk; it was only just after five but winter had stolen away the sun and its last light was leaching across the quad and the long fields running up to the cafeteria where the younger boys ate. Being juniors, and being that war had just been declared, and being that Brandon was Brandon and generally found a way to do as he pleased anyway, the two of them waved goodbye to Kenneth and David—Rupert had stayed behind to work on the philosophy midterms—and started for town. Brandon had a standing deal with Rupert that he could borrow his car at certain times if he promised to return it in pristine condition and before eight p.m., which was the dorm curfew. As such he’d taken his keys before they’d left the office and was walking along with the snow crunching underfoot, letting the keys swing from his finger and whistling some tune Phillip half-remembered hearing on the radio at his aunt and uncle’s in the week or so before he’d come to Somerville. So long ago now as to seem like a dream. 

Rupert’s car was parked behind the series of upperclassmen dorms along with the other cars belonging to housemasters and the certain few seniors who had them. It was a sort of liquid black in the crepuscular light—daytime when Phillip saw it he thought of oil slick on the highway—and the seats were a deep green leather that during the warmer months became nearly unbearable to sit on without a towel. Brandon turned on the headlights and the heater and they sat for a moment waiting for it to warm up inside. And then he pulled from inside his coat a sheet of paper. 

“What’s—” Phillip started. But they were near a streetlight and in its dull glow he could read—

“Oh god,” he said. “You stole a copy of the midterm.”

Brandon smiled. He set the midterm down in Phillip’s lap momentarily and reached into his coat pocket to fish out the pack of Lucky Strikes which still sat there from that morning. His fingers brushed Phillip’s lapel on his way back and Phillip’s heart began to strike an uneven and dizzying beat against his ribs… When Brandon lit the cigarette his face was limned in orange spark, casting shadows under his eyes, his cheekbones. He held his cigarettes oddly, removing them from his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. When the car’s interior began to fill with smoke Phillip rolled his window down slightly and a rush of cold wind blew in that made Brandon chuff his arms, glare:

“Roll that back up, would you.”

“I don’t want to sit in the car with it full of smoke, all right.” 

“So light your own cigarette—”

“Brandon, why on earth did you steal the midterm?” Phillip’s hands were shaking on his thighs. He wasn’t exactly avoiding looking at the paper, it was right there, but he didn’t like cheating on tests. Brandon had a propensity for doing it and assuming with almost childlike unquestioning that he wasn’t going to get caught. So far he hadn’t, but they were still a year and a half from graduation. 

Brandon shrugged. “It was there,” he said, and then, “Come on, Phillip, just have a cigarette, you haven’t had any since this m-morning, you’re just jittery—”

“I’m not,” Phillip snapped, lying. “You know that Rupert isn’t going to like when he finds out you took the midterm.”

For a second Brandon looked like he might yell. “Who’s going t-to tell him, Phillip? Y-You?”

Phillip swallowed. The smoke on his empty stomach was making him a bit nauseous. “Of course not,” he said, quiet. “I’m not David,” which made Brandon utter a short, sharp laugh. He was still holding the pack of cigarettes but when he held it out Phillip took it, grateful to have something to do with his hands besides fidget with his coat sleeves. “But Rupert’s going to know one of his tests is missing—”

“I’m just going to make a c-copy of it in our room tonight after dinner,” Brandon said. He was speaking fast in the manner he did when he knew Phillip disapproved of whatever idea he had. “Before I g-give Rupert the car keys. Then I’ll come back here and put it in his car; in the morning he’ll think he just h-had an extra lying around.”

It was unlikely; Rupert was fastidious, and Brandon was predictable. But Phillip only said:

_“If_ he catches you—”

“I’ll t-tell him he dropped it,” Brandon said. He was grinning again. “Oh, come on, Phillip—this isn’t the w-worst thing I’ve ever done. And anyway—wouldn’t you l-like not to have to study for at least one test?”

“Yes…” Phillip murmured, reluctant. 

“G-Good,” Brandon said. He seemed placated. He rolled down his own window to toss the cigarette out, then shifted gears. Phillip rolled his window up, stuffed the pack back into his coat. He stared at the test; he knew without having to ask that Brandon hadn’t started studying. 

They were nearly to the town, with its series of restaurants lit up in the dark, when Brandon said, “I know your piano midterm is difficult. You told me you n-needed more time to study,” and Phillip felt a twinge of something exasperated and grateful deep in the part of his chest reserved for Brandon-induced feelings, which were fluctuating and constant. 

“You stole the midterm for me?”

“Well.” Brandon slowed down so as to begin looking for a parking space. He wouldn’t even so much as glance Phillip’s way. “You don’t have to get s-sentimental.”

But at dinner his mood improved in bounds, and Phillip knew he was pleased that he’d told him the truth. On the wireless they were talking about the war, and in the papers printed out and laid on each table for the customers, old men in booths and young men standing at the bar and a few students from the prep school discussing the assembly, their older brothers, their fathers. Phillip and Brandon lit cigarette after cigarette—Phillip’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking—and they ate their fish and their soup and soft white rolls, both meals costing three dollars total between them, and Phillip’s knee occasionally brushed Brandon’s under the table. He thought of what Rupert had said to them in the club, the privilege of murder. Of war as an excuse for the superior to practice—

He did not have to ask Brandon what he’d thought of Rupert’s lesson because Brandon thought the same of every lesson, even the ones he taught in class where it wasn’t so private and frank. Brandon was listening to the radio with a little smile on his face and eventually Phillip excused himself and went outside braced against the cold which was picking up sharply so he could call his aunt and uncle from a pay phone. Just to hear that hint of normalcy… But they did not answer. And after not so very long Brandon also came out and they walked back to Rupert’s car together. 

~

In their room Brandon copied out the philosophy midterm in his slanted script while Phillip brushed his teeth and made a note in his planner to buy more cigarettes when he had the chance. The line was not long for the showers and so Phillip slipped out with his soap and a washcloth while Brandon left to put the test itself into Rupert’s car, and to return his keys to him in his housemaster’s room downstairs. He stood in the steam under the water for a long time, feeling blank and out of focus like a poorly-developed photograph. The country was at war. It was a shocking thing. The world tilted wrong on its axis. And Rupert had said there were ways to justify murder… and Phillip thought perhaps the worst of it all was that what Rupert said had made a certain amount of sense.

He got back to the room just as Brandon did. He’d left the top two buttons on his pajamas undone so as to try and cool off from the heat of the shower and Brandon’s eyes skittered like magnets stuck down his chest, the flushed skin visible there. For a moment standing in the hall neither of them spoke. Then Brandon held up his hands—

“See?” he said. “No test. R-Rupert didn’t suspect a thing.”

More like he didn’t tell you he suspected, Phillip thought, a little nastily, feeling another searing jolt of irrational anger at Rupert’s existence. He wanted to tell Brandon that Rupert wasn’t going to let him get away with everything forever, that Brandon was perhaps too comfortable with Rupert, that Brandon seemed to forget Rupert was their teacher first and their friend second… But then he thought Rupert did not always remember those things, either. So he only sighed:

“Congratulations, Brandon,” and they walked into their room together, and shut the door. They studied reluctantly together for a while sitting on Brandon’s bed calling out flashcards to each other for chemistry and for Latin, but Phillip couldn’t concentrate, and after a while Brandon took his own pack of cigarettes from his desk drawer and opened the window slightly at its base. Together they sat and smoked and stared out at the stars and the snow which had begun again to fall. 

“You don’t—you don’t want to go to war now, do you?” Phillip asked, after a long time. 

Brandon glanced at him. “What?”

“Because of what Rupert said. About superior beings killing off inferior ones. I know how you see yourself—”

“No,” Brandon said. “If I was going to kill someone, I’d want it to be for something… oh, more important to me than just war.” He flicked his ashes on the windowsill. In the moonlight his skin was pale and a bit sallow around the mouth from nicotine. “That’s what makes it the act of superiority. That we can _choose.”_

Phillip didn’t know if it was right for him to feel relieved. He just nodded, watching Brandon in the dim lamplight from a corner of their room. After a bit Brandon began humming the song from earlier, and Phillip closed his eyes. 

**_Spring 1943_ **

Brandon did not look much like his mother. She was a short woman with dark hair going gray at the temples and coming loose at the sides and in the back from the pins which held it in its bun. She wore floral print dresses around the farm and rarely went with shoes inside her own house. She did not dress at all like she was ostentatiously wealthy, at least not when Phillip had seen her, although he knew she had to be, because Brandon treated money like water spilling through his fingers yet every summer and during the Christmas holidays Mrs. Shaw let him come home. 

The first time Phillip met her had been the summer after his and Brandon’s freshman year. He’d been packing in his and David’s mostly-empty room with the door propped open by two tomes of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary when Brandon had appeared with his suit rumpled and his mouth laughing. He was holding an orange in one hand and a cigarette in the other—he’d just begun smoking about two months previous, and he smelled at that moment like nicotine and citrus—and he pushed the dictionaries aside with his leg and leaned against the doorjamb and said:

“Do you want to come to the farm with me for the summer?”

“Um,” said Phillip, with his hands plunged wrist-deep into his clothes. He’d known for a while by that point that Brandon was a Shaw of Shaw Farms, which among other things was responsible for distributing produce to the majority of well-known grocers along the East Coast, and which his father had briefly viewed as a competitor back in the teens before Phillip was born, when he’d thought perhaps the Morgan farm would take off with some financial success. And he and Brandon had become steadily closer over the year—Phillip wanted to keep an eye on the one person who knew the truth about him, but also Brandon had a certain magnetism that was impossible to ignore—but he hadn’t thought they were close enough to spend a summer together in Connecticut. 

“I wrote to Mother, and she said you were welcome,” Brandon continued, rubbing his thumb against the orange in a way Phillip was at the time just starting to recognize as a nervous tic. “So if you’d like—unless you’d rather spend the summer with your aunt and uncle in Manhattan?”

Phillip had spent his Christmas in Manhattan. Nearly a month of sitting in his aunt and uncle’s townhouse with the wireless playing the Ink Spots and Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, watching the snow—his first snow, freezing and sticky—and feeling their eyes on him as he read _A Handful of Dust_ and tried not to think of his parents, who likely were no longer even in Oklahoma. His aunt and uncle were polite, generous—but they didn’t know what to say to him. There was only a limited amount of questions they could ask about his school and his friends and Phillip could barely answer any of them as it was because he was even then reticent to talk about Rupert (Mr. Cadell, still, though less frequently) and Brandon was nearly impossible to explain… and beyond that his aunt and uncle could not or would not talk about what had happened to send him to New York in the first place. So the idea of spending his whole summer with them was less than desirable even if it meant going to see plays on Broadway and eating at select of their favorite restaurants. 

Phillip heard himself saying yes without even fully realizing he’d done it until Brandon’s smile lit his face like a match sparking wildfire in the dark. He tossed the orange on the bed and crushed his cigarette into the ashtray which David had reluctantly acquiesced to Phillip having provided he clean it out nightly and he walked forward and squeezed Phillip’s arm. His palm against Phillip’s skin was callused and rough even through the uniform jacket he was still wearing and Phillip shivered before he could quite clamp it down. 

“You’re going to love it,” Brandon said. “It isn’t like…” He trailed off, rubbed at his mouth, but Phillip had known what he meant—it wouldn’t be like his parents’ farm. Which he’d already told Brandon about in a very basic sense—the dust and the fallow fields and his grandfather’s silo which had lain empty for six months prior to his leaving and the skinny chickens that pecked through scattered seeds half buried in the dirt. The sunken porch steps and the dirty bowls in the kitchen sink and the anger tight on his father’s face when he came back from business meetings with his partner two counties over the state border in west Texas, scrawling numbers into his ledger and muttering about the failing oil company. His father had dug where he thought there was an abundance of oil and it turned out that there was not so much as he or anyone else had thought. So they had enough to scrape by on but not much else. And then the incident… But Phillip hadn’t told Brandon about that. 

He had gone to the Shaw farm that first summer—his aunt and uncle sending him a cheery farewell through the crackling phone line when he’d called—and Mrs. Shaw had been lovely and warm and busy with running the farm four years following the death of Brandon’s father, and he and Brandon had spent their time in the town five miles away or in the lake or with the horses. And every summer since Phillip had gone back, and by the time of their senior year he no longer even asked. It was just assumed that when Brandon went home, Phillip would, too. 

~

“And have all of you been accepted at your colleges?” Rupert asked. It was the last day before spring break. Classes had ended at noon and the boys had reconvened in Rupert’s office. With the windows cranked wide at their bases the breeze in the room stirred almost-warmth through the air. Fresh scents of new flowers drifted over the acrid tang of cigarette smoke. Phillip was staring at the headline of the newspaper on Rupert’s desk upside down. More about the war, always the war, consuming their lives, devouring…

David said, “We’re all going to Columbia,” and Brandon rolled his eyes. Originally it had just been his and Phillip’s plan to go to Columbia, because of the Shaw legacy, and because David’s father had gone to Harvard and it was assumed he would follow suit. But then David had applied to Columbia with them, and Phillip knew Brandon saw it as David following them, like a lost puppy in the wilderness. 

“Well, not all of us,” Phillip said, because he could sense Brandon wanting to say something nasty and vindictive and it was such a beautiful day outside he could hardly stand the idea, even after four years. “Kenneth’s staying,” and they all laughed. Kenneth smiled at the floor, the polished toes of his shoes. 

“You can make fun if you like,” he said. “But next year with everyone gone I’ll finally be able to study.”

Rupert’s mouth twitched. It wasn’t a smile, and Phillip felt the familiar old clench in his stomach—he would be nineteen in July, but he had yet to get over that strange terror he always felt in Rupert’s presence, as though at any moment Rupert would reach inside him and pull out the farm, and the dirt, and all of it, and spread it over the quad lawn for the school to see. _Phillip Morgan’s a fraud,_ he would say, _and you know what we do with inferiors—_

Brandon nudged Phillip’s arm with his own. “Hey, dreamer,” he said. Something in his tone made Phillip ache, a long-suffered torturous thing so familiar as to seem almost sweet. He nodded towards Rupert, who was watching Phillip, expectant and amused. 

“Sorry,” Phillip said, shaking his head. “What is it, Rupert?”

Still with his mouth in that not-smile, Rupert said, “I only asked if you were going to Columbia too, Phillip.”

Phillip’s pulse ratcheted up a degree. _Why? Why, you didn’t ask anyone else._ It was fight or flight with Rupert, it was always fight or flight. He supposed in some perverse way Rupert would probably be flattered to hear that. It probably tied into his Nietzschean philosophies in some underhanded way Phillip would never fully be able to wrap his mind around. 

Out loud: “I’m actually, uh—I’m waiting for my acceptance letter to come in the, at the post office. Brandon and I were going to check today after school…” He let his voice trail off. He didn’t like speaking much in front of Rupert, it always felt insignificant. As though no matter what he said it would be wrong. 

“Well.” Rupert’s mouth twitched into something a little more genuine. “Good luck.” 

“You haven’t been accepted yet?” David asked. His tone was curious, but something in it made Phillip’s fingers go to his sleeves. David’s father, Mr. Kentley, was one of the richest men in New York. David was richer than Brandon, even, a fact which Brandon ignored, and the idea of him not getting into any college he wanted was laughable—he’d bragged for hours at dinner last week about his own acceptance into Columbia, blind to or simply ignoring the way Brandon’s mouth had tightened increasingly at the corners as the evening had progressed. By the time they’d all gotten back to the dorms Brandon was positively seething and Phillip had snuck them into the music hall with Mr. Arnold’s key and played Chopin’s nocturnes for almost an hour until Brandon—flipping through _Time_ magazine and smoking Phillip’s cigarettes—had seemed to calm down. It did not seem to matter to Brandon that he, too, had been accepted, that his acceptance was of course guaranteed by his last name alone. 

David just didn’t have tact, that was all. Phillip figured he’d learn it as he got older. But it was still aggravating, in some faint way like scratching at the back of his mind with sandpaper, that David was looking down on him because he’d gotten in and Phillip hadn’t yet. And that David probably thought he was being very subtle about it. 

“No,” Phillip said. “But I will be.”

“What’d you write your entrance essay on?”

“Music theory,” Phillip said, and David laughed. It was not a very kind sound. 

“You’d be better off applying to Juilliard if you want to do all that,” he said. “Columbia won’t—”

“You got a C-minus on your last philosophy exam,” Brandon interrupted; his voice was calm but Phillip could feel the tremors running through him, close as they were sitting. “You should spend a little more time reflecting on how much you want to study instead of telling Phillip he can’t get in based on his essay.” 

Phillip was only in the philosophy club still based on the fact that Brandon wanted him there. He didn’t enjoy the subject the way Brandon and David seemed to. Even Kenneth was more in it for the stories than for the Kant and the Heidegger. Phillip had no intention of studying it once he was in college. He’d always found it a relief that Brandon continued to want to be his friend in spite of how little they had in common. And yet it was unsurprising, too; Brandon had never once told anyone the truth of Phillip’s parents, and with each year as they grew closer Phillip became more and more convinced that it was Brandon who needed him, in some unclear overwhelming way… 

David frowned at Brandon. “I was just saying—”

“I know.” Brandon arched an eyebrow at him; after a moment David exhaled, and held up his hands:

“Sorry, Phillip,” he said, and Phillip shrugged. Heat was crawling up the back of his neck, yet still he was pleased. On the wall which after so many years had become encroached with vines the clock ticked over twelve-fifteen, and Rupert stood up. 

“Have an excellent vacation, gentlemen,” he said. “I’ll see you all in a week.”

~

Outside they exchanged goodbyes in the soft heat of the sun. 

“I’m driving out with my parents to visit Princeton,” Kenneth said. “They keep saying it’s never too early to start looking. Especially since all my ‘little friends’ are heading off now.”

Brandon laughed. Kenneth’s parents were a source of endless amusement to him; only Phillip knew it was because he found them, as well as the Kentleys, to be incredibly bland people, capable of little more than sipping wine with dinner and listening to the same record over and over and staring with polite blank interest at various famous paintings in museums. Their sophomore year he’d talk himself hoarse nearly every night for two months straight about how he and Phillip could never, ever be that boring, that ordinary. He pronounced the word with such cold disdain that Phillip couldn’t help but agree. 

“Good luck, then,” he said, clapping Kenneth on the shoulder. And then, turning to David with a tight attempt at a smile:

“Give Henry and Alice my warmest, would you?”

He was not at all on first-name terms with the Kentleys. But David did not point this out, perhaps still feeling the searing effects of his glare from in Rupert’s office. There were times when even David knew to back down. Phillip wondered if it would be like this all the way through college, too. 

“I will,” he said, smiling back in much the same manner. Then the four of them went their separate ways, Brandon and Phillip heading in the direction of the post office. He could feel the tension dissipating from Brandon’s shoulders the further they walked; his own heart had begun to pick up slightly, the letter would be there, the letter that would at last put him at a level with Brandon, with David, with Kenneth, with all the others…

“You should come to the farm,” Brandon was saying as Phillip pushed the post office door open. “I know it’s only spring break, but I’m sure Mother would love to see you…”

“You mean I wasn’t already invited?” Phillip asked, mock shock that made Brandon laugh. The post office was empty and quiet, the tight single aisle stretching around a corner, and then another. They walked along listening to the hum of fluorescent lights until they reached Phillip’s box. He crouched, opened it—inside there was a long, official-looking envelope. The crest of Columbia in one corner and Phillip’s own name in bold type at the center. His hands were slick so that he could not bring himself to touch it and after a moment Brandon sighed, annoyed, and bent to take it himself. 

“Hey—”

“Should I open it for you, too? Or are you capable of that, at least?”

“Oh, give it here,” Phillip snapped, wiping his palms on his trousers and snatching the envelope from Brandon’s hands. It was thin, it hardly felt like anything. Which later upon reflection Phillip would have to admit was how he knew what it would say before he’d opened it. 

_Dear Mr. Morgan:_ (it began, in officious type, if type could even be such)—

_We regret to inform you—_

Phillip must have had some kind of expression on his face, or made some sort of noise, because Brandon was suddenly there, taking the letter from him—

“What is it—” Then his eyes scanned the words, lips moving silently over the lines… his brow tightened the further he got and for a moment, irrationally, Phillip was afraid that at last it was too much, his upbringing and his inability to get into what had been their dream school since sophomore year and the other, unspoken thing that Phillip was almost positive Brandon knew about as Brandon knew everything… his disinterest in philosophy and in Rupert, the fact that he preferred track to sculling… that after four years Brandon had finally decided Phillip was inferior, and he was going to throw him away here, now, in the cramped space of the post office, with two months to go before graduation—

“This isn’t fair,” Brandon said. Actually he sort of snarled it, with much the same vitriol as he spoke of David when he was really annoyed. It was not the sort of reaction Phillip would have expected from someone disgusted by him and his presence and he allowed himself to feel a kind of budding hope, insomuch as he could feel hope with his chest crushed in.

“I know,” he said; he tried to put a laugh in his voice, even though he knew Brandon didn’t like that. “I’m the only one of us who doesn’t cheat on exams and I didn’t even get in—”

Brandon shot him a sharp look. “Did you read the letter?” he asked. 

It was one of those moments where Phillip felt like some point had been made which had flown entirely over his head. “I saw it said regret at the top, I figured—”

“They put you on the waiting list,” Brandon said. The way he said it made it sound like they had sent Phillip copies of all his father’s tax returns with nasty commentary in the margins. “They didn’t reject you, they said—here, they said, ‘We regret to inform you that our current capacity for the class of 1947 is full, but you have been placed…’ etc. etc.” His brow was still tight; he was touching his mouth and Phillip could tell he wanted a cigarette very badly. Himself he could’ve gone for scotch or something similar; the relief he felt was nearly palpable, he hadn’t been rejected. He wasn’t still the same dull and unintelligent boy from Oklahoma, after all. 

“Why are you acting like this is worse?” he asked Brandon. 

Brandon sighed. It was his contemptuous frustrated sigh, the one that meant Phillip wasn’t getting it fast enough and Brandon could hardly believe he had to stoop to explaining things when Phillip should just understand immediately. As though their brains were somehow connected—although in fairness often Phillip thought that somehow they were…

“Because a waiting list—you’re never going to get off the waiting list.” He folded the letter up again along its creases in a way that made it clear he’d rather be crumpling it up or perhaps tearing it. “It’ll be months from now and you’ll still just be waiting to get accepted, you’ll—you’ll just _stagnate.”_

Exasperation and affection. Again and again, cyclical. Usually the exasperation overshadowed the affection but they both generally waxed and waned with alarming speed, like the moon if its orbit was quicker. “I don’t appreciate your implication that I can’t get accepted by another college, Brandon—”

“Did you apply to any?”

Of course he hadn’t. There wasn’t any point. Brandon had been driving the idea into his head for so long now of the two of them at Columbia that Phillip had refused to even consider anywhere else—Princeton, his uncle’s alma mater, or Yale, or even some non-Ivy League school… not that Brandon would have understood it if he’d gone to one… They’d stayed up half of last semester together with their cigarettes and the radio Brandon’s mother had gotten him for his birthday on very low so the housemaster—no longer Rupert, but some full-of-himself grad student Brandon couldn’t stand and played various pranks on that Phillip was in turns amused by and thought perhaps too immature—wouldn’t hear and confiscate it, writing their entrance essays on Brandon’s Underwood, or on Phillip’s Remington. When Brandon got lazy Phillip had taken over his, polishing the wording in places because Brandon was not exactly a writer. They’d submitted at the same time; Brandon was just asking now because he disapproved of Phillip’s actions. Or because he disapproved of himself for not having warned Phillip to broaden his search. It amounted to the same thing either way. 

“No,” Phillip said, and then, “but I won’t stagnate. That—that isn’t an option.” Where else would he even go? Back to his parents’ farm? The only way he’d even be allowed on the land would be if they weren’t there, and there would be nothing left for him anyway, except the dust and the animal bones and the miles and miles of nothing stretching into forever. 

“No, it isn’t.” Brandon scratched the back of his neck. After a moment he put the letter into its envelope and stuffed the whole thing into the inner pocket of his uniform jacket. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go pack.”

Phillip swallowed. “You still want me at your mother’s place?”

“Of c-course,” Brandon said. His own throat moved; he had a familiar expression in his eyes, sharp and quick and a little tense. Phillip wondered what he was planning. 

“What are you going to do, Brandon—”

“I’m just g-going to ask Mother for a favor,” Brandon said. He sounded almost defensive. “It’s nothing you can possibly d-disapprove of, all right?”

Phillip sighed. He stared at Brandon’s hand which was shaking. Reaching into his pocket he pulled out his cigarette pack and pressed it into the palm as they walked out. “Sure, Brandon,” he said, soft, resigned. Exasperation and affection. As always. 

~

Mrs. Shaw met them at the train station in New Haven the following afternoon. It was one of the few times Phillip had seen her in public; she wore a dark emerald dress and her hair was pinned back in a way that mostly hid the grays and she carried her gloves in her folded hands. When Phillip bent to kiss her hello he smelled the perfume she had dabbed onto her neck and cheeks. She was positively beaming as she reached out to touch his hand— _hello, darling, what a wonderful surprise!_ —and then to press her fingers to Brandon’s cheek. 

“My sweet boys,” she said. “Oh, how I have missed you both.”

“Hello, Mother,” Brandon said, squeezing her hand. He was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt with the collar open slightly and the sleeves rolled. Phillip enjoyed seeing him like this, relaxed and casual. 

“What brings you out here, sweetheart?” Mrs. Shaw asked as the three of them began walking to her car. She was speaking to Phillip; she could not understand why his parents had cast him off and so had taken to treating him as a second son. 

“Uh,” said Phillip, glancing at Brandon. 

Brandon made a face. “It’s Columbia,” he said. “It’s—that is, I wanted him to see you too, of course—but there’s a, a problem.”

Mrs. Shaw smiled a little with the corner of her mouth at Phillip as she unlocked the trunk of her car. It sometimes occurred to him in a fascinated way that she had been dealing with Brandon’s particular flavor of intensity his whole life. That any person could be used to Brandon Shaw was nothing short of a miracle. 

“A problem?” she asked, as Brandon and Phillip lifted their suitcases into the trunk and then walked around to settle in the backseat. 

“With my—”

“He was put on the waiting list,” Brandon said, and ignored the look Phillip gave him for interrupting. He was jittery from having been on the train all morning and also likely from the coffee they’d been served in the breakfast car. At some point during the ride he’d begun to recite certain of Nietzsche’s phrases he’d memorized to Phillip in a too-loud voice and their neighbor had banged on the wall between their cars to shut him up so consequently he was fidgety and a little sullen even after three cigarettes. Still Phillip knew it would be easier as it always was to deal with Brandon on the farm, where he had plenty of space to walk around in and the new dog and the lake. 

In the rearview mirror as she turned the ignition and began to pull out of the parking lot Mrs. Shaw’s eyes showed a certain understanding Phillip couldn’t quite read all the way into. “I see,” she said. “Well. Let’s get home and I’ll see what I can do about that.”

Brandon looked at Phillip as if to say, _told you._ Phillip raised his eyebrows back: _I didn’t say anything,_ and Brandon sighed, shook his head, and stared out the window. 

“How are your aunt and uncle doing?” Mrs. Shaw asked several minutes later. 

Phillip didn’t really know. He hadn’t seen them nor hardly spoken to them since he’d gone to their townhouse for three days at Christmas; they still didn’t know how to approach the subject of what happened on the farm despite it having been nearly four years and even though they were kind and gave him the things he needed—presents, including the Remington; eggs for breakfast; a single ticket to see the afternoon showing of _Rosalinda_ —he’d been thankful when the twenty-seventh had rolled around and they’d driven him back up to campus. But out loud he only said:

“They’re fine, thank you,” and Mrs. Shaw smiled in a satisfied way with her gloved hands flexing upon the steering wheel, and they drove on into the cool afternoon.

~

The farm itself spread out over nearly six hundred acres of land; Mrs. Shaw lived in a house that was near the edge of it on a stretch of gravel road set half a mile in from the road which wound its way through their property from the highway. It was so much land and all endless green, bordered by trees and by another farm to the west. It was directly to the right of the porch that lay the lake where Brandon had learned to swim at age five. During the summer they generally swam in it on the hottest days but as it was spring now and too cold upon arriving at the house Brandon and Phillip went and sat at its edge for a while as Mrs. Shaw’s housekeeper gathered their suitcases from the trunk and put them in the house and spoke to Mrs. Shaw about varied things going on. Brandon listened with a clinical interest and smoked his cigarette with his sleeves partially rolled down and Phillip stared at the pale sunlight reflecting off the lake onto his skin. They didn’t talk; they were winding down. Phillip was wearing a sweater which he was pretty sure had at one point belonged to Brandon and he was fidgeting with the sleeves and thinking abstractedly of the letter and of Columbia and wondering what he would do if whatever Brandon’s mother was planning didn’t work out. 

“What is it?” Brandon asked him; he had one knee bent up nearly against his chest and his arm stretched across it with the wrist crooked and his cigarette trailing smoke from between his fingers; he was not looking at Phillip yet he had asked like he knew Phillip was thinking about things. 

“I—do you think David was right?”

Brandon turned to look at him sharply. “About what?”

“What he said about my entrance essay, do you think, I mean, is that why—”

“No,” said Brandon, with such savagery that Phillip shut his mouth. “Absolutely not, no.”

“Maybe if I had written about—”

“David is lucky that Mr. Kentley is so rich or he wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting in at all.” Brandon tapped his ash into the wet grass under his feet. “He should have just minded his own business and applied to Harvard like the old man asked him to but instead he had to come to Columbia because he doesn’t know how to leave well enough alone.” 

Phillip decided perhaps it would not be politic to point out that Brandon had at least partially also gotten into Columbia because his mother was rich, and because the Shaw family had gone there for at least three generations previous. “I’m just saying—”

“Well, stop saying it,” Brandon snapped. “David doesn’t know shit, okay? He just said that b-because he’s, he’s jealous.”

What—

“What do you mean, Brandon—”

“He’s jealous that you can play—” Brandon ground the remains of his cigarette out with the heel of his shoe so as to have both hands free to move his fingers a little in the air—“And that…” He gestured between them. Phillip’s heartbeat kicked into a painful rapid angry pattern he could feel in his throat. 

“What—”

“That we’re so close.” Brandon seemed almost to struggle saying it. Phillip hid his smile into the thick sleeve of Brandon’s sweater; he reached into his own jeans pocket and pulled out a half-crushed pack of cigarettes from which he extracted one and lit it in the chilled wind coming off the lake. He remembered once when he and Brandon had first picked up the habit and David had initially expressed his disgust at it, Brandon had tried to explain it as just something to do with your hands—and, too, Phillip remembered that as one of the last times Brandon had bothered trying to be patient with David. 

“He’s just so bland,” Brandon was saying now, “and he’s so—Christ, he’s so irritating. He can’t hold friendships like this. He and Kenneth—” he waved his hand, dismissive—“and he doesn’t know what he wants or anything like that. Not like you and me. He’s—” Brandon hesitated, with a familiar look on his face that meant he didn’t think Phillip would like whatever was coming—“inferior.”

The old superiority/inferiority thing from the beginning of the war, which in later years Phillip would come to recognize in its actuality as the end of everything. “You just don’t like him—”

“Oh, and I suppose your opinion of him is much better.”

“No.” Phillip sighed; everything with Brandon had to be some kind of contest. Brandon was either fighting or he was asleep, and even in his sleep sometimes he’d woken Phillip over the years with various mutterings and his brow was always tight in a way that looked painful and his hand was in a loose clench about his sheets. “No, it’s not, really…”

“So you see my point,” Brandon said. “His opinion doesn’t mean anything. It’s e-entirely invalid, you see.” He reached over and squeezed Phillip’s arm at the join of his shoulder and neck and Phillip closed his eyes and felt the heat of the sun against his eyelids from where it was beginning its descent into the horizon. “Your essay was fine. You h-have to trust me sometimes.”

Phillip thought, when have I ever done anything else? When he opened his eyes it was because Mrs. Shaw was calling to them from the front porch to come in for a snack; she’d changed back into her floral print and stocking feet and Phillip felt a small, sharp ache at the back of his throat. He stood, let Brandon clasp his wrist for support in dragging himself to his feet. Together they walked around the lake and into the house.

~

Being on the Shaw farm was like being trapped in some pastoral dream of the late nineteenth century. Mornings were very slow in coming with the dawn breaking in inexorable bluish-lavender gradient over the horizon which faced the guest bedroom where Phillip slept. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling and the shapes on the walls and around the room which gradually appeared as the grainy light became increasingly white—the lamp Brandon had told him belonged at one point to some Victorian aunt; a wireless that for some reason only tuned into three stations; a record player leaning against the wall under the window. When the sun broke open the clouds to the east Phillip would get up and walk to the window with his feet bare on the cold wood of the floor and watch the farmhands gathering the chickens and herding the cows with Brandon’s dog running loops around their legs and barking. In the far distance sometimes he could hear the bells of a church in the town—usually at that point he crawled back under the covers until Mrs. Shaw came knocking at the door to let him know breakfast was ready, at which point he’d shuffle downstairs with his hair sticking up in various directions and find Brandon already seated at the table in some overlarge sweater and pajamas, sleepy and frowning into his coffee. They ate toast and eggs and Phillip glanced at the paper to see about the war and eventually they went outside to see the horses. Occasionally they helped the farmhands; Phillip’s muscles ached with a strain he remembered from his parents’ farm and found he had missed. And so it was every day. 

They did their homework on the front porch in the afternoons. Brandon read select passages from his English books out loud to Phillip and Phillip made notes for his essays and they both spent some time confused over their physics before ultimately giving up and moving on to Latin which was not much easier but which at least didn’t require math which neither of them was very good at. There was nothing from Rupert which of course disappointed Brandon; he curled up and read _Being and Nothingness_ while Phillip glanced over his sheet music and both of them smoked cigarettes and ate grapes from a glass bowl Mrs. Shaw brought outside. And in the evenings Phillip played at Mrs. Shaw’s Steinway while Brandon sat listening with his head tilted and some unreadable expression on his face. 

Mrs. Shaw was writing to the board of Columbia about Phillip. The whole thing was very embarrassing but Phillip didn’t quite dare tell anyone—in truth he was strangely also glad to have her backing him. It was that usual mix of exasperation and affection for Brandon that he had lived with so long now he had to get used to it or else he couldn’t continue spending time with him. And that didn’t seem like much of an option. 

On the radio, Roosevelt talked about the war and the Nazis and Churchill. And Phillip shivered through mostly sleepless nights in his bed upstairs staring at the expanse of stars through his window and trying not to think about the copy of Plato’s _Symposium_ he’d seen on Brandon’s bedside table, because he was sure it couldn’t mean what he thought. 

~

The Thursday before they were supposed to return to school they went out horse riding in the early part of the afternoon but discovered quickly it had been a mistake as it was already raining before they’d gotten a mile onto their usual path. Turning both their horses around they managed to get back to the barn before it started coming down hard; it was a needle-sharp sort of heavy rain accompanied by wind and occasional lightning flashes in the distance and as such with the relative distance from the barn to the house they elected to stay inside until the storm had passed. They climbed the ladder into the loft and sat among the hay and the wood listening to the rain hammer against the corrugated tin roof with a harsh insistency. Everything smelled like water and like animals and Phillip’s hair was sticking a little to the back of his neck where the rain had gotten him.

Brandon leaned back against one of the bales. In the dim light with his arms folded behind his head and his eyes half shut he looked like the decadent prince of some deposed royal family. His shirt was open and his skin was a little sunburnt at the collar and Phillip’s fingers itched with the desire to touch. So he lit a cigarette instead even though he knew it was a monumentally stupid idea to smoke anything inside a barn. And after a moment Brandon shot him a look like he wanted to say something but instead he just closed his eyes again and sighed. 

“Just two more months,” he murmured. Under the rain his voice was barely audible. 

“Yeah,” Phillip said. Mrs. Shaw had finished her letter of recommendation to the board last night and gone to town this morning to mail it in addition to picking up her groceries. He couldn’t imagine what would happen if they didn’t accept it and put him in. If the waiting list nightmare Brandon had described only last week came true—

“Hey.” Brandon’s voice was suddenly closer; he’d sat up, his knuckles were in Phillip’s hair momentarily like to draw his attention forth on a golden strand. “Don’t—you’ll get in.”

Phillip made himself smile, or anyway he made the corners of his mouth lift. “I know,” he said. He could taste his fear in his throat. It felt vaguely like the threat of discovery of his true upbringing was tied in some irretrievable way to whether or not he got into Columbia. Because surely if he got rejected for good David would figure it out, and then it was only a matter of time—

“S-Stop,” Brandon said; he reached out, took Phillip’s cigarette where it was burning nearly against his fingers, put it in his own mouth. The sight of it was shocking and Phillip felt a flush rise on his cheeks and spread all over, down his neck, between his legs… With an effort he wrenched his gaze to the far wall, to the door through which the rain was just visible striking at the ground. “You’re going to get in. It’s inevitable.”

“You can’t know that—”

“It’s your privilege,” Brandon said, “as one of the few superior—”

For no apparent reason Phillip suddenly wanted to scream. “Would you shut the fuck up with your superman bullshit for once in your life?” he asked, and his voice came out shaky and harsh and hoarse with smoke. Brandon blinked at him; removed the cigarette from between his lips and opened his mouth like to speak and Phillip cut him off: “Rupert isn’t God, okay, and I know you think he’s the most brilliant human being to ever walk on this planet but he’s just—he doesn’t know everything.” _And neither do you,_ but saying that felt like crossing a line Phillip wasn’t sure he could come back from. “Even if, even if we are superior, really, it can’t guarantee me a spot in Columbia. It just can’t.”

“Phillip—”

“You got in because of your name and your money and your essay—”

“You wrote part of that essay for me,” Brandon reminded him, unexpectedly. His face was tense like he wanted to fight but wasn’t letting himself, which was rare, and rarer still that he hadn’t already just gotten up and walked away—even through the rain—because Phillip was disagreeing with him. “If you wrote an essay that got me accepted then you’re superior, so you’re going to get in, too. And whatever else you want.”

It was so completely illogical. Phillip felt a burning in his throat that meant he was going to cry. He turned from Brandon and stared at the rain and the horses down below and thought of his parents’ farm and the war and his aunt and uncle in their townhouse. And he thought of Rupert who had put these ideas into Brandon’s head in the first place and again he felt the old hot twist of jealousy.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

“Yes, it does,” Brandon said. 

“I’m poor,” Phillip reminded him.

“So?”

“So how—how could I be superior—”

“I wouldn’t spend so much time with you if I didn’t think you were,” which was true, and it made Phillip feel an odd mix of condescension and that strange brand of not-quite-envy he only encountered with Brandon and also relief, buried in among all the rest. 

Outside thunder sounded in the distance like some hollow bowl clattering. Phillip opened his mouth, unsure of what he was going to say, and shocked himself when what came out was: “I never told you why I left the farm, did I?”

Brandon had by this point finished his cigarette which was really Phillip’s; he ground it out on the edge of his shoe where the leather was scuffed to hell anyway. “No,” he said. 

“My father caught me in the silo,” Phillip said; he couldn’t believe he was saying this, rushing out of his mouth like rainwater, like sin, like a poison that had to be purged. “With a farm boy’s hand in my pants.” The words tasted dark and old with their secrecy; Phillip’s hands were shaking on his thighs. “After that he said he didn’t want someone like me on his property, so he shipped me off to Manhattan to live with my mother’s sister and her husband.”

Brandon was watching him with that same singular intensity he usually bestowed upon Phillip during nearly all of their conversations. “Do they know?”

“They know,” Phillip said. “And they’re very kind people, but they can’t ever quite look at me when I’m in a room with them.” He had looked down at his shoes; now he laughed, once, harshly. “I can’t believe I just told you that,” he said, more to himself than to Brandon. Again he felt like crying. So long he had kept this one secret, so long not even Rupert had figured it out. It was as though he had just eviscerated his soul with a sharp knife and left the varied pieces out for Brandon or anyone to spit on—

“Still think I’m superior?” he asked, with a wry angry twist to his voice. He was still staring at his feet and his hands which were shaking which was why he didn’t notice Brandon’s hand until it was on his shoulder and he was saying:

“Of course I do, but you’re so goddamn _dense_ sometimes—” and when Phillip looked up to refute this point Brandon kissed him. His lips were warm and dry and he smelled like the saltwater in the lake and like dust and cigarettes. He pressed his long clever fingers for a moment against Phillip’s cheek and Phillip sort of forgot how to breathe. 

When Brandon pulled back he did not go far enough that their foreheads could not still touch. The skin of his hand was stained yellow with nicotine between his thumb and index finger and he was sitting so close to Phillip that their thighs were nearly on top of each other and Brandon had _kissed_ him. Phillip could still feel the pressure of it on his mouth. It seemed such an unlikely event as to have been a dream, in the quiet dark of the barn with the horses making soft nervous noises at the storm and the rain hitting the roof. It could not have been real, except that there was a new taste in his mouth now, and Brandon’s hand was light in his hair. 

“What the hell, Brandon,” said Phillip, after a long time. His heart was in his throat. He felt like someone had perhaps struck him across the back of his head in a stunning blow. His hand kept going to his mouth. Outside the rain was going on unaware that the world had just stopped.

“I mean, I like you,” said Brandon, “I didn’t really think it needed much explanation—”

“So you’re not, you’re not fucking with me,” said Phillip. “Just for some weird, I don’t know…” Some weird Brandon thing. “To mess with my head because you can.”

Brandon frowned. “I w-wouldn’t do that t-to you,” he said; it was quiet, more so than Phillip had ever heard him; it was almost—hurt. And when he looked at Brandon’s face it was drawn in the half-dark and tense and Phillip who for years now had been able to read him by the slightest shift about his eyes recognized the rare sincerity he usually only ever showed to Phillip, and he remembered how for a long time now he’d known without fully understanding it that Brandon needed him…

He said, “Okay, Brandon,” and he said, “I’m sorry,” and he reached up and touched Brandon’s hand where it still rested near the back of his skull. After a moment Brandon curled their fingers together and drew their hands down between them. He kissed him again; there was an edge to it, a desperation; they were both thinking: _I can’t believe I waited this long—_ He bit Phillip’s lip and Phillip exhaled into his mouth. 

_Hey, dreamer._ He couldn’t believe he hadn’t known before. Or at least that he hadn’t suspected it might be mutual… Against his own volition he felt himself smiling. Momentarily the rain ceased, and then they climbed down from the loft and walked back to the house together to head upstairs and dry off and smoke out of Phillip’s window with the latest Jimmy Dorsey record on.


	2. 1943-1945

**_Fall 1943 – Winter 1944_ **

**i.**

David had been rambling on for nearly five minutes according to Phillip’s increasingly pointed glances at his watch about “the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my entire life” when Brandon kind of slapped the tabletop. 

“Okay,” he said, over the jazz band playing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” in the corner. “Do you even know what her name is?” 

“J—uh. Jane? Judith? Uh—Jan… Janice?”

“Great social skills you’ve got there, Kentley,” said Brandon, with a dry look at Phillip, who himself had gotten tired of this dance about ten minutes in. Sweat had gathered at the back of his neck in a light sheen and the fluorescent glare in the ceiling was sheer on his face and the crowd was pressing in like some seething massive animal. What he wanted was to go back to the dorm and lie on his back on the bed he pretended was his own for appearances’ sake until Brandon called him over. And then for the two of them to fuck around until they fell asleep half-clothed and sweating under the sheets. But Brandon had said that doing that every single night was boring—even though he apparently hadn’t had a problem with it all summer at his mother’s farm—and then of course David had invited them to come out to the USO dance at Stage Door, and now—

“Is she even real?” Phillip asked, trying to pull himself out of his thoughts before they strayed too far. Brandon shot him an amused look over his cigarette. 

“Is she—” David gaped at Phillip, mouth slightly open, the lower lip shiny with sweat and with the remnants of whatever he’d been drinking—club soda. In the glaring artificial light he looked like some kind of pompous fish. “Hold on a second,” he said, and shoved his chair back, and headed off in the direction of the bar. 

“Let’s go, Brandon—” Phillip started.

“We’ve been here an hour and a half,” Brandon said, glancing at his own watch. “It’d look pretty odd if we just up and walked out.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Phillip pressed; he was aware that he was whining, his voice was sharp in his throat, and Brandon was looking annoyed, but he couldn’t stop himself. His ears hurt and he was sick of David and he didn’t like the way the girls all looked at Brandon even though he could hardly blame them. “We could just say we have to study, or… I don’t know, tell him I’m sick, tell him—”

“Look,” Brandon interrupted, “would you just—”

“You don’t even _like_ David, why are you pushing this,” Phillip said.

Brandon’s grip on the cigarette was tight and it had nearly gone down to his skin yet he didn’t seem to notice. “Why do we always have to do what you want, Phillip,” he said, and this was such a complete falsehood and so inane for him to say that all Phillip could do was laugh. He was still laughing in a sharp and jagged way about a minute later—Brandon summarily ignoring him, pressing at the burnt space between his fingers and staring across the room at the dancers—when David returned to their table with a girl who was taller than him by half an inch. She was wearing a bluish dress and her hair was up and her face was small and lovely with bright intelligent eyes. Phillip could see Brandon looking at her. He wanted to take back the past few seconds of his life and say something to make Brandon forget he was irritated. He was much easier to deal with when he wasn’t annoyed at Phillip for things that were often his fault. Sometimes Phillip wondered if Brandon remembered that he’d been the one to kiss first. 

“This is Janet Walker,” David said. There was clear pride in his voice at having at last remembered her name. She just looked bored; Phillip had noticed often girls at these dances looked bored, as though it was some tactic to get the soldiers to dance with them more readily. “Janet, this is Phillip Morgan and Brandon Shaw.”

“Hello,” Janet said to Phillip. Her accent was affected and haughty and Phillip sort of nodded at her fumbling with his cigarette case under the table. When she turned to Brandon her expression changed minutely in the corners and Phillip felt as though he was watching some disastrous event unfold which he could not stop with his hands or any part of himself. 

“Do either of you go to Harvard?” she asked, sitting when David pulled back a chair for her. 

Brandon made a noise. “We’re all three of us at Columbia,” he said, shooting David a look. “He didn’t tell you?”

“Oh, he didn’t say much,” Janet said, amused—when the waitress came past their table she ordered maraschino cherries. “Just that you all are prep school chums.”

Chums. Phillip glanced at Brandon but he was not even so much as looking Phillip’s way; it felt like being hit in the throat. 

“I’m at Radcliffe,” she said, “which is why I asked about Harvard—”

“My father is a Harvard alum,” David blurted. “Henry Kentley?” He said it often around campus at Columbia as well, as though it were a trophy he was waving; the name decorated and shining with money. 

“Oh, really,” said Janet, in a disinterested voice. She had not stopped looking at Brandon, who was looking back with a slight curve to his mouth that Phillip could read easily as boredom; Brandon was bored, he was going to let this girl talk herself out and then they would go back to the dorms and everything would be all right. 

“Well, as you can see, we’re all very rich here,” Brandon said, and Janet laughed. At last he looked at Phillip as if in some perverse acknowledgment of the lie and Phillip felt a twist of hot anger in his stomach—

“So what are you doing here, donating money to the Cause?” she asked. The waitress had come back with the cherries and as Janet reached forward to pick one from its bowl she allowed her fingers to graze Brandon’s sleeve. And another sharp feeling exploded in Phillip’s chest, old and familiar, the same jealousy as when Rupert had claimed Brandon’s attention. It always felt like Phillip was fighting to share Brandon with new and beautiful people who might at any moment whisk him away… and Phillip hadn’t even come into Brandon’s life first to begin with…

They spoke for a long time; after a while Phillip made himself stop listening and instead focused on the band and on the dancers. Sweat pooled and collected under his arms and on his upper lip until he could taste the salt of it there. Occasionally he chanced to look in Brandon and Janet’s direction and they were always laughing about something—in the end the only good part of the night was watching David’s face slowly shift from hopefulness into despair as he realized Brandon had stolen Janet’s attention. Although even that was a sour victory as Phillip understood Brandon stealing Janet’s attention meant Janet also had the entirety of Brandon’s. His shoulders tense under his jacket he smoked through half the pack of cigarettes and felt himself growing lethargic and sullen and eventually when they had been there for two hours or so he leaned slightly over the table and said, cutting across whatever remark Brandon had been opening his stupid, perfect mouth for:

“We have to leave now, the last bus to campus is going in fifteen minutes.”

This was of course a completely unnecessary statement as Brandon had over the summer acquired a car with which he drove himself and Phillip nearly everywhere with the windows rolled down and the hood shining liquid red in the sunlight. Brandon leveled him with a certain look Phillip knew meant his annoyance from earlier hadn’t dissipated and Janet was watching between them with curious eyes—everyone was always curious when it came to Phillip and Brandon—and for a moment he thought Brandon would catch him in his lie by tossing him the keys and saying he’d find his way back later. But instead Brandon took Janet’s hand and kissed it on the palm; when he stood it was very slow and languid and torturous and Phillip’s eyes were glued to the stretch of skin which showed briefly before he tucked his shirt back into his trousers. He did not bother saying goodbye to David, who of course had had a car since their senior year at Somerville. 

“See you, chum,” Janet said, as though they were old friends. 

They started out together. Phillip felt dizzy with how angry he was. 

“She’s staying in town for the weekend at her aunt’s,” Brandon said. “Not too far from your aunt and uncle’s place in Manhattan; I wonder—”

“That was a really neat trick you pulled,” Phillip hissed; the band was still blaring and the horns hid his voice neatly away. “Flirting with her right across from me—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Phillip,” said Brandon, “what did you expect me to do?”

“I don’t know,” Phillip said, “but not that—”

“Well, and why not?” Brandon had stopped just inside the door. 

“Because where is it even going to _go?”_ Phillip snapped. He was aware this was the wrong setting for this conversation but the music was so loud like to crawl inside his skull and breed there, and he was angry enough that it was seething under his skin. “What are you going to do, wax poetic to her about your superiority until she agrees to test it out in bed?”

It was exactly the wrong thing to say, provocation and immaturity. Phillip was jealous and Brandon had sniffed it out like a shark scenting blood upon water; Brandon had been flirting with Janet because he knew Phillip wouldn’t like it but now he had concrete proof and Phillip knew he should have just kept his mouth shut.

“What if she likes Nietzsche, Phillip?” Brandon almost-whispered, down near his ear. The feeling of him so close in this sweat-soaked room made Phillip itch. He wanted to pull Brandon close and he wanted to shove him away and it was as it had always been now for five years. “What are you going to do, kill her?”

“Kill David, maybe, for introducing you,” Phillip said without thinking; he was shocked at himself, but Brandon started laughing, and for a second Phillip thought perhaps he had fixed things without even meaning to. 

Then Brandon said, “You wouldn’t,” like a challenge, and Phillip said:

“Well, neither of us will ever know, will we,” and when Brandon asked why in his very soft dangerous voice Phillip knew better than to say anything yet he said, “Because you aren’t going to ask her out.” Actually he sort of scoffed it, derisive as Brandon could get sometimes, and Brandon who had been turning fully to the door stopped, and his mouth tightened momentarily at the corners, and he said:

“Watch me,” and he walked back to the table where David and Janet still sat together unspeaking. He bent low near her ear and whispered something that made her laugh and then something else that made her smile a little and nod. Then he was scrawling what was undeniably their dorm phone number on a scrap of paper she’d fished out from her purse and she was writing something too and handing it to him. They both put their respective papers away. He was laughing at David’s shocked face. When he walked back to Phillip he said:

“Told you,” and it was just another non-contest he’d made sure he won anyway. Phillip felt sick all over.

They walked out into the bitter biting November wind. Frost had collected on select parts of the sidewalks and on the road signs and around the edges of Brandon’s windshield. _Don’t call her,_ Phillip thought, staring desperate across the hood of the car at Brandon. _It was just a joke. Don’t call her._ But Brandon after a moment only said:

“Knock some of this ice off your side, would you?” 

~

He could not now nor had he ever understood why it had gotten so difficult so quickly after starting college. The summer previous they had spent at the Shaw farm as usual and nothing had seemed changed, except of course certain aspects of the nature of their relationship, which to Phillip’s surprise hardly felt like a change at all. At night after Mrs. Shaw was asleep Phillip would sneak downstairs and into Brandon’s bedroom, or Brandon would come up to the guest room—on the hottest nights in July they would go to the lake. Brandon’s body under the water was pale and lithe and lit in the blue-white glow of the moon like skim milk spilled across his shoulders. They had not had sex, but they’d done nearly everything else, and Phillip felt fresh and whole and alive. 

Of course at Columbia they shared a room. And for a time it had seemed like things would continue on in much the same vein as they had. But then Brandon started avoiding him, like Phillip had some incurable virus—like the truth of what they were to each other now was splashed across their skin. At night in the dorm Phillip felt tense and shaky until Brandon at length would permit him to come close; he would press his face into Phillip’s bare shoulder and exhale with his brow tensed and he would say, “Christ,” in a soft exhalation like he was talking about the Eucharist. They shared cigarettes and Brandon sometimes could not sleep without Phillip’s fingers in his hair, Phillip’s mouth against his neck. 

But during the day when Brandon and Phillip went anywhere together in public it was often difficult to tell if Brandon even wanted him there at all. It had not been this way at Somerville where they had for four years essentially lived out of each other’s pockets and Phillip could not place the shift and he did not want to ask out of fear of what Brandon might say or do. He knew on some level that Brandon still needed him in that strange codependent way and he knew that he was the only one Brandon would talk to about anything with real meaning and yet—

There were not many women on campus, but the few that were noticed Brandon, because everyone noticed Brandon. He hadn’t flirted with them with any real seriousness but the various superficial friends they had made since arriving had begun to rib at Brandon about “his girl”— _got a girl back home, Shaw? Where is she? Gonna pick up someone in the city this weekend?_ —and Phillip could tell it was needling at him; he was very concerned with appearances, or with maintaining some kind of illusion that he was, in a way he hadn’t been back in prep school. And he wasn’t explaining anything to Phillip and it was increasingly difficult to read him. Which Phillip had never thought would happen. 

In Brandon’s philosophy class they were discussing Plato’s _Republic._ In Phillip’s Advanced Piano I they were practicing Poulenc. At night sometimes when things were quiet on campus they would sneak into the music building and Brandon would read from his texts while Phillip played and it was as close as it had ever been to Somerville. And Phillip hoped it was enough to keep Brandon with him. 

~

When they arrived back on campus after the USO dance it was well after the dorm curfew and the housemaster was slumped in his chair with a newspaper talking as usual about Germany spread open in his lap. He’d fallen asleep with a lamp on and Brandon and Phillip moved silently past him to the stairs and up to their room. There was ice at the corners of the windowpane and the ceramic of the sink was almost unbearable to touch. Down the hall in the bathroom Phillip could hear several of the boys laughing in a slurred drunken way that echoed off the tile walls of the showers. 

Brandon at his bed had undone his tie and was unbuttoning his shirt. His hair had come loose from its cream and in the half-light from under the door and from the dim lamp on Phillip’s dresser he looked very warm and angular and lovely. Phillip ached to put his hands on him but he didn’t think he was allowed. 

“D-Don’t put on such a scene n-next time we’re out somewhere,” he said, after a while. “People will see.”

“Oh, really?” Phillip snapped. “Maybe that’ll teach you not to be such an ass in public, then.”

“Janet was really sweet,” Brandon said. He was almost smiling, with his mouth and in his voice. It made Phillip want to strangle him. “I enjoyed her company. Which is more than I can say for you.”

“I’m glad you’re so _amused_ by all this,” Phillip said. “What—this isn’t a _game,_ Brandon. She doesn’t know about you and your weird little ideas; she isn’t going to appreciate all your grandeur like—” He stopped. Brandon glanced up at him; his shirt was off, Phillip could see the scar from his appendix removal, the skin puckered and white. 

“Like you?” Brandon asked. Smiling definitively now.

Phillip in lieu of answering walked over to the sink and began running the water in a vain hope it might warm up some before he washed up for the night. “She won’t last,” he said, cold. And in the mirror he could see Brandon watching him and he didn’t know if he wanted it this way.

“She’ll last as long as I like,” Brandon said.

“You’re only interested in her because you know David wanted her,” Phillip said. And because you want to make me angry, he didn’t say. 

Brandon’s brow furrowed. He looped his belt off, unzipped his pants. There was a small cluster of freckles on his right hip which Phillip enjoyed tracing in a constellation, over and over. The skin was warm and soft there. Phillip wanted his mouth on it now. His mouth and his fingers, and to not be fighting. Above all, to erase this night, and to not be fighting. 

“She’s sweet,” he said again. It was an odd word, coming from his mouth. It sounded like a foreign language.

“When have you ever wanted someone sweet?” Phillip asked. “I thought sweet people were boring and inferior.”

Brandon shook his head in a way that didn’t quite seem like he was disagreeing with Phillip so much as he was done with the conversation. A moment later he’d crossed the room to where Phillip was beginning to brush his teeth in the freezing water. In his underwear he looped his arms around Phillip’s waist; it felt like a slap, after everything that had happened. But Phillip didn’t shake him off, either. He supposed that was his own fault. 

In the mirror Brandon’s eyes when he lifted them were that same particular Brandon-flavor of earnest and devastating that Phillip had never once been able to ignore. “You c-can’t stay angry with me,” he said. “Phillip.”

_You promised you wouldn’t fuck me over,_ Phillip thought. _You swore that just eight months ago._

“I don’t like this,” he said out loud. Brandon sighed into his hair. 

“I don’t know what else—” he started. But then he drew his voice in like on some spool. He backed away from Phillip and sat on his bed and bereft of his warmth Phillip shivered. He hurried through brushing his teeth and splashing his face; he turned the lamp off and walked to stand in the moonlight coming in through the window. When Brandon reached for him he did not refuse. He thought of Janet saying she was at Radcliffe and how far that was and how Brandon wouldn’t want to keep this up for long with someone he couldn’t even talk to. He didn’t let himself cry and he didn’t speak and Brandon’s mouth was warm on his and after a while they slept with Phillip’s head pressed against Brandon’s collar. In the morning when Phillip woke he was alone. He went to the window and saw a fine dusting of snow on the ground that would melt by noon. He pressed his forehead to the glass for a long time feeling unmoored. And the feeling grew worse when he looked down and saw the note Brandon had left for him:

_Coffee in the city with Janet. Back by 11._

~

**ii.**

He called his aunt and uncle first to see how they were— _oh, yes, thank you for asking, sweetheart, we’re fine; Horace has been doing a lot of walking lately, you know; I’m just pleased as punch you like the university._ Then he called Kenneth for a moment in the senior dorms at Somerville and somehow ended up on the phone with Rupert. He was hunched into the wedge of a phone booth off campus and touching the little marks people had left with their pens and their knives and wondering at all the life that had passed through here. It was very cold. Last week the country had been at war for two years. Next week was final exams. 

“Well, Phillip,” Rupert said, in that usual way of his, like divining secrets without having to try. “How’s Columbia?”

Phillip leaned his head against the glass wall of the phone booth and shut his eyes. He hadn’t had a cigarette since yesterday because Brandon had confiscated his pack and then taken a train up to Radcliffe and Phillip hadn’t had time to replenish. Thusly his hands were shaking. Thusly all of him was shaking. 

“It’s not Somerville,” he said, and for some reason Rupert laughed. 

“How’s—everyone?” he asked, and Phillip knew he meant Brandon, so he said:

“Well, David’s doing fine; I think we’re all pretty sure he’s going to transfer to Harvard after this year though—”

“Oh?”

“His dad keeps at him about it and…” Phillip hesitated. Brandon would have said, _you know how David is,_ and Rupert would have understood. But himself he had never gotten over his inability to talk to Rupert; even after graduation it had continued to feel like scrutiny. Standing here alone in Manhattan he would not have been talking to him now at all if he wasn’t so desperate to hear someone else’s voice—

“And?”

“And he’s—well, Brandon’s just at him all the time.”

“Still?” But Phillip could hear the smile in Rupert’s voice. Again the old twist of jealousy—

“Still,” he said. “Are you surprised?”

“Hardly.” A pause. “How is Brandon?”

Phillip wound the phone cord around and around his wrist until the skin turned a faint shade of something like a bruised plum. “He’s got a girl,” he said, and waited, but Rupert said nothing, so he went on, “Her name is Janet. She’s at Radcliffe.”

Rupert made some kind of noise that Phillip couldn’t interpret. “That’s—” Another pause. “When’d he meet her?”

“Last month.” It was strange to say; it felt like it had been years. Half the calls that came through on the dorm phone were for Brandon. He’d written her a few times, the keys clacking so loud on his Underwood Phillip was obliged to get up and walk out or else he’d have thrown the entire thing out the window. “At Stage Door.”

“Huh,” said Rupert. “And you don’t mind?”

Phillip felt the vertebrae in his spine stiffen against his coat. The wind blew a little harder against the booth and he curled more closely around the phone. God, he needed a cigarette… “What do you mean, do I mind?”

“That Brandon is dating a girl.”

“Why on earth would I—”

“Because you’re fucking. Aren’t you?” 

The same soul evisceration from prep school. Every time Brandon would bring up his parents’ farm. And in the barn last spring, the seconds before Brandon had kissed him—

“What?”

“Don’t play coy with me, Phillip; I don’t have time for it.” Rupert’s voice was that same sharp and impatient shade Brandon’s got when he thought Phillip was being deliberately slow. “It doesn’t make any difference to me either way. I’m just asking on a personal level, as a friend—”

“You aren’t my friend,” Phillip blurted. “You’re my goddamn teacher and I won’t—”

The call cut out. In the abrupt silence the wind blew on a knife’s edge between his skin and the receiver. He wanted to slam it against the glass of the booth until one or the other or both broke and he wanted to punch something until his knuckles bled and he wanted to scream and he wanted to—to—he didn’t know what he wanted, except that the feeling was all over. Uncontainable. He walked to the nearest five-and-dime feeling sick; he bought three packs of Lucky Strikes and smoked down half the first one on his walk back to campus. In the dorm hall which was empty he picked up the phone and redialed Somerville. Rupert picked up like he’d been waiting. 

“It must be very difficult,” he said.

“You don’t know anything about it,” Phillip said. 

“Do you want to have dinner with me?” 

The non-sequitur made Phillip blink. “Uh—”

“Oh, come on, Phillip, do you want to have dinner or not?”

Phillip looked down at the three packs of cigarettes in his hand which was still shaking; he thought of his cold empty dorm room and Brandon who would not return until late Sunday evening and he thought of his exams, and how he hadn’t been practicing his Poulenc nearly enough. And he said:

“Yes. All right. Sure,” without hardly knowing what the hell he was doing. He took down the address and time Rupert gave him and then hung up and for a while stared out the hall window at the snow which had begun again to fall, and the beginnings of the sunset which was muted by the clouds. When another boy came by he got up and went into his and Brandon’s room and shut the door. 

~

They met at seven-thirty at an Italian restaurant close to where Phillip’s aunt and uncle lived; being that they knew about him he wondered what they’d think if they walked in and found him with his old teacher. Rupert had not changed overmuch (never mind that it had only been six months since he’d last seen him); he was limping a little from his knee and when he sat his face twisted momentarily with pain but he smiled afterwards all the same, and shook Phillip’s hand, and asked again how he’d been. He ordered champagne and a salad appetizer and for a while the two of them sat in silence listening to the radio talk ever about the war and listening to the soldiers on leave in the booths talk about anything but to their wives and girlfriends. 

“You were both very obvious in school,” Rupert said at last. “Of course I was going to figure it out.”

Phillip glanced around to see who might be listening but their booth was in the back and private. _You didn’t figure out everything,_ he thought, digging his nails into his thigh under the table and trying to feel triumphant. “We weren’t even—” He made a gesture. “That wasn’t going on in school.”

Rupert leveled him with a look. Phillip didn’t know what to say back, and so he didn’t say anything; finally when the silence grew uncomfortable he said:

“You can believe me or not, but we weren’t together like that back then.” He took a sip of his drink; it was sharp in his throat and unused as he was to anything alcoholic he winced. “You’d believe Brandon, if he told you.”

“Oh, I believe you,” said Rupert. “You never were very good at lying, Phillip.”

Under the table he tugged at his sleeves. “I’m decent at it,” he said.

“I’m sure you’ve had lots of practice with it since Brandon got this new girl, this—what, Janet—”

“I don’t want to talk about that.” Phillip’s voice was sharper than he’d meant it to be; he could see Rupert’s eyes amused in the light and he didn’t like that, he didn’t like the way Rupert was always laughing at him. As though he were some, just some insignificant thing that was tolerable only because Brandon dragged him along everywhere. He wanted to say, I am my own person, you know, I have friends outside of Brandon, but he didn’t, really, and sometimes he wondered how much of himself was even his own and how much was carved from what he’d made himself in order to be more desirable to Brandon. “You’ve never liked me, have you,” he said, and Rupert blinked.

“I like you just fine, Phillip—” 

“You put up with me because Brandon likes me,” Phillip snapped. 

Rupert crossed his legs at the knee and ankle. He had a certain look Phillip had learned over the years to be cautious of yet he found he could not stop running his mouth:

“If Brandon hadn’t pulled me along to the philosophy club all those years you would’ve never even thought twice of me.”

“Did you want me to?”

“No,” said Phillip, aware that it was too insistent. “No, that’s not what I—don’t twist my words like that.” It felt like trying to talk to someone who was always three, four steps ahead of him in some elaborate game Phillip wasn’t even aware of playing… at least with Brandon they were on somewhat equal ground and—anyway prior to Janet—if Phillip wasn’t quite caught up he was also always the only person that Brandon would bother slowing down for. 

“Because I was always under the impression that it was you who didn’t like me,” Rupert said. Smiling. 

_Stop making fun of me,_ Phillip wanted to say. Angry he pulled a cigarette out if for no other reason than to have something else to look at for a while. “I like you fine,” he said, though of course it wasn’t entirely true. 

“You put up with me because Brandon likes me,” Rupert said. 

“Don’t—” Briefly Phillip had to pause while the waiter came and took their orders— _spaghetti, Phillip? It’s only fifty cents_ —and refilled their glasses; Phillip was surprised to find his nearly empty. And that his cheeks were a little warm. When the waiter had walked away again he said, “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Mock me.”

“I’m not.”

“You repeated my same sentence on purpose to make some kind of point—like you think you’re superior to me or something.”

He half-expected Rupert to say, well, aren’t I? Rupert’s own cigarette case was sitting on the table between them, golden; next to Phillip’s creased pack it looked—well, it looked exactly the way Phillip knew Rupert intended it to look. But Rupert only laughed.

“So all this time, and you haven’t forgotten my old lesson.”

Nietzsche. Phillip wondered if he’d ever escape it. “No. I don’t think I could, Rupert.”

Rupert withdrew a cigarette from his case and lit it behind his cupped hand. He blew the smoke, took a swallow of champagne. His rings glinted in the lamp. Phillip could pick out the tiny gray hairs forming at his temples. 

“I’m sure Brandon didn’t let you forget it,” he said. 

Rupert saying Brandon’s name was like something sharp in Phillip’s chest. “Please don’t mention him,” he said. 

“You shouldn’t allow yourself to get this hung over about it—”

“Why?” Phillip was almost shouting; his second glass of champagne was already half empty and he didn’t know when that had happened either. “Why, because I’m allowing myself to be emotional?”

“Someone of true superiority wouldn’t let it affect them this way,” Rupert said. “You’d take it at face value and move on.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, you and Brandon and your superiority—that’s not being human, Rupert, that’s—that’s not even _possible!_ Everyone is affected by some, by some emotion sometime—”

“You can still learn to control it,” Rupert said. Against his fork his fingers were twitching. 

“You mean you can,” Phillip said, “and not everyone is you.” Brandon just spoiled you to think that, he thought resentfully, pressing out his cigarette into the ashtray at the center of the table.

Rupert did not say anything. Eventually their food came and they ate; the third time the waiter came to refill their champagne Rupert asked him to leave the bottle. It was nearly empty except for a thin quarter inch at the bottom when Phillip said:

“I really, really hate him,” and he could see that Rupert knew who he meant. He could see also something else shining in Rupert’s clear gray eyes and it was markedly more pronounced than usual by the champagne. 

“You shouldn’t let him—”

“Shut up,” Phillip said. Sullen and resentful. His cigarettes nearly gone from the first pack. He was tempted to ask Rupert for one except that in truth he wanted to touch nothing of Rupert’s. “He always liked you. It’s your fault.” A pause. “And I don’t let him—control me. Or whatever you were going to say.”

“Oh, no?” That smile again, that smile Phillip hated. Rupert really didn’t know him, a single thing about him. He knew about people he wanted to know; Phillip wanted to say, _Brandon finds me superior even if you don’t,_ but he couldn’t, the words were stuck—

“No,” Phillip said. His skin was so flushed he’d had to loosen his collar and undo the top button. “I’m my, my own—myself. I’m not just Brandon.”

Rupert started laughing. The restaurant was emptying out and so Phillip didn’t have any particular issue with reaching out under the table to grab at his knee—the bad one—to shut him up. He winced and Phillip felt marginally bad but then he realized it was probably something else Nietzsche would approve of, using some superior intellect to figure out the only way to shut a man like Rupert Cadell up and so he started feeling proud instead. And then Rupert’s hand closed around his and he felt—he felt—

“Rupert—”

“The dorm is mostly empty; you won’t see Kenneth or anyone else you know.”

“I don’t—”

“He already took Janet without your permission,” Rupert said. “Superiority or inferiority, Phillip?” and Phillip swallowed. 

“All right,” he said. “All right.”

They left money on the table without waiting for the check—five dollars in total, which Phillip thought was way too much but of course as Brandon generally paid for things he didn’t really know. Outside Rupert’s car was waiting with the green leather interior and the slick black chrome—when the heater had warmed it up several minutes later it was like sitting in a conservatory. Phillip thought of _The Great Gatsby,_ and of he and Brandon sitting in here two years ago nearly exactly with the stolen midterm and Brandon smoking his cigarettes and Phillip wanting without knowing precisely what he wanted—then they drove off into the gaslights.

~

It only hurt for a second—sudden, sharp, quick pinch—then Phillip didn’t feel anything much except the stretching. He thought of comparing this foreign invasion with the one in Europe and it made him laugh so much Rupert got annoyed and bit his thigh. Eventually Rupert’s knee hurt too much for him to fuck into Phillip from above so they switched positions and Rupert lay on his back on his mattress in the housemaster’s room—Phillip wondering if it was coincidence that Rupert had come back to this dorm after he and Brandon had graduated—and Phillip rode him with Rupert’s hands on his thighs guiding his movements. It was an aching sweaty act. They didn’t kiss—Phillip couldn’t bear the idea. When Rupert came he made a lost noise into the meat of his forearm and Phillip wondered if he was thinking of Brandon, too. 

Afterwards they lay side by side not touching. Rupert was asleep or at least pretending to be and Phillip was smoking his cigarettes from the fancy gold case and shivering with his sweat cooling on his skin. He stared out at the moon—it was the same moon Brandon was looking at five hours away from what was very probably Janet’s bed in her dorm where he’d snuck in. Or perhaps they’d rented a hotel in Boston proper. In either case Phillip knew Brandon was not thinking of him at all. 

The space between his legs ached viciously. And he felt it would be worse in the morning. And so would the dull throb already starting between his eyes from the alcohol. At around three he gave up on sleeping even for a while and dressed as silently as he could and slipped out without waking Rupert or leaving a note. There was a taxi he caught halfway to town—when he got back to the dorm he realized he’d forgotten his cigarettes in Rupert’s room and though he knew there were still two remaining packs squashed somewhere in his desk he started to cry. 

~

Sunday afternoon when Brandon returned from Radcliffe he had with him three fresh packs of cigarettes, and a new suit jacket, and a tie for Phillip with etchings at the bottom in gold thread. He opened the door to their room while Phillip was sitting cross-legged and feeling the leftover pull and burn of his muscles deep inside himself on his bed trying in vain to study for his geology final. He was smiling that small soft thing reserved for the two of them alone and he said:

“Hey, dreamer,” and Phillip who had only recently within the past three hours or so stopped crying suddenly felt very much like he might start all over again. He reached out instead and Brandon said, “Oh, what, you missed me?” and Phillip said:

“Just—come here, okay,” and Brandon startled him by obliging. He dropped the cigarettes on the mattress and his suitcase on the floor and he pushed Phillip’s schoolwork out of the way and slid his hands up his thighs. The heartbeat in his throat was rabbit-quick against Phillip’s fingers. His mouth was warm and soft—he’d had chocolate rations on the train. Phillip felt so guilty he was nearly sick with it.

“What’d you do all weekend?” Brandon asked, pushing his hand into Phillip’s hair. 

Phillip shook his head. “Nothing,” he murmured, and tucked his face against Brandon’s neck. 

~

“How was Janet?” he asked a while later. His lips were bitten-in and sore from kissing and they were both shirtless and holding hands in a loose way between them. He had discovered it was easy to forget for long seconds what had happened on Friday. 

“She’s all right,” said Brandon, which meant she was boring him. “She’s writing for their school paper. Little articles in the back.”

“Any good?” Phillip asked, to be polite.

“Not particularly,” said Brandon, and they both laughed. It was also easy to be cruel with Brandon. To be and to feel superior to the rest of society. The only two in all the world—

“She wants—” Hesitation. “That is, I might have s-suggested—”

Phillip twisted a little so as to look at the side of Brandon’s face. “What,” he didn’t exactly ask.

Brandon sighed. “She h-has a friend, a g-girl named—Susan, I think, S-Susan or Sue Ann, and s-she wants you to c-come up with me during Christmas b-break and.”

“Brandon—”

“Look, I told her y-you don’t have a girlfriend.” His voice was defensive; he pulled their hands apart so he could turn too. “What the hell was I supposed to say? She asked. So I t-told her the truth. And she wants to s-set you up with her f-friend and the four of us g-go on a, on a d-date together—”

“Oh, I’m sure that will be fantastic,” Phillip said. “You, me, Janet, Susan-or-Sue Ann, and our giant fucking secret all holding hands—”

“F-Fuck, Phillip,” Brandon snapped. It was the most he had stuttered in a long time and Phillip wondered how much he’d rehearsed this speech on the ride home. “Don’t be such a, s-such a dick. Jesus Christ.”

Phillip could feel his nostrils flaring. “I just don’t appreciate you, the way you’re doing all this,” he said. “Moving us around like chess pieces—”

“Well, don’t come, then,” Brandon said. “J-Janet already thinks you h-hate her. It won’t make any difference to m-me—”

“Liar,” Phillip said. His hands were shaking again. Why couldn’t Brandon just admit— _I need you. I need you and I don’t know how._ Phillip could have forgiven him if he’d just say it out loud. But he had to make it difficult. Phillip had known for years Brandon needed him desperately yet still he had to make it difficult—

“C-Come or don’t,” Brandon said. He had turned away; he was shaking a cigarette out. His shoulders were trembling and Phillip knew he wasn’t crying but still it wrenched within his chest. He reached out and his hand hovered over the skin at the light smattering of freckles by his neck—but Brandon was tense and after a few seconds Phillip pulled back without touching. 

“Of course I’ll come,” he said, soft, a little later. And Brandon didn’t say anything in return but his knuckles brushed the thin stretch of skin at the center of Phillip’s spine. 

~

**iii.**

Janet’s friend (“it’s Susan—you can call me Susie, everyone does”) was pleasant enough. She had short blonde curls in the style of Shirley Temple and about the same babyishness of face, but she dressed like upper class and she spoke in a light rainfall of a voice. She was from Pennsylvania and her older brother was in the Pacific and likely he would never come home as their mother hadn’t received a letter from him in nearly a month. But she seemed to have compartmentalized this fact along with every other from the war because from the subject quickly she moved to other things—she was majoring in home economics, she had a sister at Sarah Lawrence, and she enjoyed Hitchcock’s films; her favorite thus far was _Rebecca._

The four of them walked along a street outside of the campus. In the late afternoon sun it was quiet; the few cars that went by made a sound like water rushing. Ahead of them Brandon and Janet were holding hands and the sight of it twisted in Phillip’s stomach like a snake. 

“—favorite subject?” 

Susie’s voice floated in through the anger and the jealousy and the sick nauseous feeling at having hidden a secret from Brandon now for two and a half weeks. Phillip could feel his shoulders pulled tight as kite string ready to snap; inside everything was racing in the way it did when he drank too much coffee. “What?” he said. Perhaps he said it rudely, because she flinched a little.

“What’s your favorite subject?” she asked again. “I mean—what’s your major? What do you do?”

It felt accusatory. He was certain Brandon had told neither her nor Janet about his parents’ farm and yet he tensed further, expecting—some derogatory comment, you’re not even from a working farm, what on earth could you provide for me or anyone else? 

“I play piano,” he said. 

“Oh, really? So do I!” Her voice was curved up with happiness; Phillip wanted to seize her, to tell her how stupid she was being, couldn’t she see this was a ruse? Two weeks ago his old teacher had fucked him and he still had fading bruises on his hips where Rupert had gripped him too hard. When Brandon had seen them he’d told him he’d banged into the shower walls and Brandon had laughed and called him a clumsy idiot, but fondly. And now he was walking hand-in-hand with some _girl_ and it was too much. 

Instead he didn’t say anything at all, and after a time Susie cleared her throat and said, “Janet told me Brandon is interested in psychology, right?”

Phillip laughed, the derisive wicked thing he’d learned years ago from Brandon. He hated himself like this but he was so full of sickness and jealousy and anger there wasn’t room for anything else. Certainly he didn’t want to be here and he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t simply refused to come. 

“Philosophy,” he said. 

Her cheeks were flushed and he knew it wasn’t from the cold. “Yes,” she said, slow. “Philosophy.” A pause; up ahead Brandon and Janet had stopped to examine some tree and Phillip and Susie were coming upon them when she asked, “Which philosophers?” and Phillip said:

“Mainly Nietzsche. You know, the superman… superiority and inferiority and all that.” He shoved his hands wrist-deep into his pockets. They’d stopped walking. “I’m sure you’re at least smart enough to know where on the scale you’d fall.”

It was perhaps the rudest thing he’d ever said out loud. Susie stared at him; so did Janet. Brandon for a moment looked as though he might laugh but he hid it rapidly into his cheek when Janet turned back to him with shock all over her face. “Can you _believe—”_

“What is _wrong_ with you,” Susie asked, “why on earth would you say something like that?”

“Oh, don’t mind him,” Brandon said, cutting off anything Phillip might have said. “He just doesn’t know how to function around people.” He was speaking to Susie but he was looking at Phillip; his mouth was tight at the corners and his hand was flexing and Phillip hated himself and he hated Brandon and he hated that it was one in the same. He felt flat, like some hideous misshapen unself, and he was shivery and he wanted a cigarette and he wanted a drink and he wanted for none of this to have happened. 

“I think maybe you’d better leave now,” Janet said, coldly, glaring at Phillip. She’d put her arm around Susie who was crying a little. 

“Yeah,” Phillip said, “whatever,” and he walked off back down the unfamiliar street until he arrived at a bus stop where he waited over half an hour for the transport which when it came was enormous and reeked of diesel and traveled like some laborious overweight animal through Boston proper until it got to the hotel where he and Brandon were staying. And the whole time he waited at the stop he’d been half expecting Brandon to come up and grab at his arm and yell but Brandon had never arrived. It gave him a lost lurching feeling and as he stood alone in the hotel it grew worse. He thought for a moment about calling Rupert but he knew that would be a bad idea. Instead he called down to room service for a drink. He started in on it sitting on his bed and staring out the window at the dirty, dismal snow which had begun to fall. By the time Brandon arrived nearly three hours later the sun was gone and Phillip was drunk. 

“I told you this was a _brilliant_ idea,” he said, the minute the door was shut. “Just absolutely, just fucking _phenomenal—”_

“Oh, don’t you even start,” Brandon said, tossing his coat and then his suit jacket over the back of the desk chair. “You were so rude—”

“Rich coming from someone who threw himself into a relationship as part of some weird experiment.”

“I n-never—”

“You don’t even talk about her when I ask because she bores you so much you have nothing at all to say about her!” Phillip dragged his hands through his hair; when he tossed the bottle back against his lips he had to nearly tilt it at a ninety-degree angle to get everything at the bottom. “And then you, you force me to come out here and spend the afternoon with one of her equally dull friends—”

“You s-said you were going to do it, Phillip, you said y-you’d come—”

“God help me I had no idea you were going to introduce me to someone who can’t even tell the difference between psychology and philosophy—”

“We’re above it all anyway, what does it matter?”

“Clearly enough that you have to keep dating her.” He set the bottle down, or anyway he tried to; it slipped from his hand and landed with a dull thump on the carpet. Brandon was watching him exasperated with his arms folded tightly across his chest.

“You’re not actually s-still jealous, like really, are you?”

“Well, clearly.”

Brandon opened his mouth and Phillip snapped, “So help me if, if you say ‘what else was I supposed to do’ one more fucking time—” and after a second Brandon shut it again. For several minutes both of them stood in silence, Phillip’s cheeks flushed with the drink and with his anger and Brandon looking as always terrible and attractive and so dangerous in his rolled sleeves and his loose collar.

Then Phillip said, “What even is the appeal?”

“What?”

“I mean, did you do what I said? Did you, did you get her into your bed talking about superiority—or, wait, does she think you study psychology too?” It was not funny. But Phillip was laughing anyway. It was that or else kill him. 

“That’s enough, Phillip, honestly—”

“No, I mean really. How good is she to keep you coming back like this when the thrill of taking something from David and pissing me off must have worn out ages ago—”

“W-We haven’t fucked, if that’s what you mean,” Brandon said. His mouth was so tense it had gone white at the corners. Later Phillip would wonder if perhaps in his drunken state he was distracted by the color of Brandon’s lips when he was angry or else the clench of his hands or else the agitated breathing which was why when he opened his mouth to spit some vitriol such as, _oh why not, I’m guessing she’s too good for that, too?_ what came out instead, beyond his control entire, was:

“So I’m finally a step ahead of you,” and when Brandon said, with his eyes narrowed:

“What the hell do you mean?” Phillip laughed, scornful, and he said:

“Isn’t it obvious, Brandon? I’ve fucked someone before you.”

No, he would also say later, thinking about it, when he allowed himself to think about it at all. It wasn’t just that he was distracted, it was the guilt. The sickness of holding in the secret for two weeks when he’d never hidden anything from Brandon before except of course how he felt about him which hardly counted as Brandon had done the same and anyway their mutual attraction was palpable and vivid. The guilt and the bruises and the fact that Rupert was Brandon’s favorite and that Brandon was Rupert’s favorite and that it was Phillip’s jealousy and his anger and his fear that had led him to this moment—When he told Brandon that yes, it was another man, and that yes, they both knew him, he could see it in Brandon’s eyes that he understood, immediately, who it was. But still because he was cruel and because he was Brandon he made Phillip say it out loud. And when Phillip did he saw Brandon’s face shift like in clear water and he knew even drunk that he’d fucked up in a way that was perhaps irreparable. 

“You’re going out with Janet,” Phillip tried to say; he was shaking. “You fucked me over first. I can make, I have just as much right as you to make you jealous—”

“S-Shut the f-fuck up, P-Phillip,” Brandon snarled. His hand was shaking at his side. After a moment he snatched his room key off the table and his suit jacket and he left. The door slammed so hard behind him the walls rattled and their neighbor banged twice with his fist. Phillip waited for the cold triumphant feeling to steal over him. But instead he felt only cold. Drunk and cold and sick and very, very alone. 

He climbed into the bathtub and turned the shower on until the water went lukewarm. He dried himself off with a towel and passed out in bed still naked halfway under the sheets. When he woke it was because he was shivering so hard his muscles had cramped. It was five in the morning and Brandon still hadn’t returned, but Phillip’s head was pounding through the meat and gristle and bone of it and as such he could only grab his pajamas and stumble into them and then crawl back in bed to pass out a second time… When next he woke it was nearing nine and Brandon’s things were gone. There was a note by his bed next to the trashcan:

_Puke in here or else you can pay for the damages to the carpet or the sheets or whatever. There’s money on the table for a taxi and for another train ticket. I’m not waiting for you._

Indeed there were two crisp ten dollar bills on the table; it was more than Phillip needed, some of it was for food. He cried until his headache got worse and he threw up but in the bathroom and then he packed and ran a comb through his abysmal hair and went downstairs to check out and leave. There was a train heading back to Manhattan at noon and he just caught it. The whole ride he spent smoking and holding his stomach and trying not to remember anything from the night previous and failing. It was worse than death, or so it felt. After a time he rested his head against the window, and eventually he slept. 

~

**iv.**

For a while after his return they tried living together still in the dorm—Brandon went to his mother’s for a week and Phillip went to his aunt and uncle’s and then they came back and discovered they could not be in the same room for more than five minutes before they were ready to tear each other’s throats out. As such Brandon suggested—really more like commanded, not that there was ever much difference between the two for him—that Phillip move in with David for a while. It was a mark of just how angry he was with Phillip over the whole thing that he did not even say it in the usual contemptuous sneering voice he might have. The two of them got with David and his roommate who agreed in a colorless voice to sharing a room with Brandon provided he not smoke in the room on account of his asthma. 

“Oh, my god,” Brandon said, laughing, with his hand over his eyes. But he didn’t refuse the offer either and then Phillip knew everything had really gone to shit. 

They moved most of Phillip’s things to David’s room over the course of half a day—his sheet music, his bedsheets, his cologne, his cigarettes, his clothes. The bedside lamp that had sat all year on top of his dresser. His worn copy of _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ which he had never been able to get rid of despite having not touched it since the end of their junior year—he saw Brandon glaring at it as Phillip walked out and he knew what he thought and he couldn’t find the energy to care. His Remington and papers and a few swatches of ink just in case and his tight bundle of money left over from Christmas. The rest he left behind including of course his room key for the asthmatic boy who stood trembling at the doorway with his suitcase and his sheets bundled up in one bone-thin arm looking ready to cry for no apparent reason. 

“You can’t smoke either,” David said, once Phillip had fully settled into his room and was sitting on his new bed staring out the window—bereft now of the sight of the clock tower and facing only thick lines of forest Phillip felt a dizzying lurch of permanency about the whole thing. “I mean uh, obviously you can smoke in like, in the lobby or outside or whatever but not—I mean I’m, uh, you know. I’m used to not having smoke in my shit anymore and I don’t want—”

“I get it, David,” Phillip said, pinching the bridge of his nose. 

David was quiet for several minutes. Then: “I’m looking forward to sharing with you again. I feel like we never see each other anymore.”

“No,” said Phillip.

“You know—” hesitation—“if you want to talk about whatever happened—”

“I don’t, really,” said Phillip. David drew in a breath like he wanted to perhaps protest in which case Phillip was ready to start seriously yelling at him, but after a beat he shut his mouth and shrugged and lay back on his own bed opening his copy of Pearl S. Buck’s _Dragon Seed._ Phillip sat for a while and then took up his sheet music and walked to the music hall and spent the afternoon practicing with more force than any of his pieces called for. 

~

**v.**

Phillip had only just walked into the room when David was shoving the papers in his face: “Look—” Demanding and insistent. Shaking with his excitement. “Look.”

Phillip looked. On the top of the paper was stamped the seal of Harvard with its motto in the three books splayed open upon the royal crest like bloody ink. And below in neat type: _We are pleased to inform you—_

“I didn’t know you actually applied,” Phillip said, wrapping his scarf around the edge of one of his bedposts and sitting on the edge of his mattress. “I thought—” But he couldn’t finish— I thought it was a joke. I thought you weren’t serious enough about this stuff. During their rare moments of camaraderie in the first semester before everything had gone to hell at Stage Door he and Brandon would sit around mocking David’s earnestness when he spoke of phone conversations he’d had with his father or his mother about Mr. Kentley’s alma mater. _I can’t wait to go to my daddy’s school,_ Brandon would say, with his mouth pursed up, and Phillip would push his chest out and walk bowlegged around the room saying fake Latin words in an exaggerated version of Mr. Kentley’s accent until Brandon was doubled over with laughter. 

“I did,” said David. Then he frowned a little. “I applied right before you came to stay with me. You didn’t see the letters I was sending out?”

Phillip thought he himself was lucky he’d been able to focus on actual schoolwork for the past month. But he only said, “I guess not,” and David shrugged:

“Oh well. Yeah. I applied. And I got in. God, I gotta call Dad, he’ll be—oh man. Wow.” David was beaming. “Harvard, Phil. Harvard!” ‘Phil’ was a recent thing; it had started after Phillip had begun staying with David and sometimes he got the sense David had been calling him it in his head already for years prior. “It’s going to be so great, like really, like just absolutely—”

“Are you going to study the same thing there?”

“Uh.” David’s smile faltered a little along its edges and Phillip felt a cold thread of amusement wind its way along his spine, inasmuch as he ever felt amused these days. David had changed his major three times already; currently he seemed set on literary studies, with what seemed to be a sort of focused concentration in philosophy, but Phillip doubted it would last. “I—yeah. Yeah.” He nodded like to convince himself. “Yes. It will be.”

“Good for you,” said Phillip. He’d had a cigarette before coming in; he could still feel the burn of it in his throat. Outside the sun was making weak attempts at coming through the clouds and the snow which was settled in clumps around the lawn outside their dorms and on the roofs of the buildings opposite. “I bet your dad will—”

“He’ll probably come here, like with—like maybe champagne or something.” David didn’t drink, either, and his voice dropped with a little thrill as though hiding from the possibility of the housemaster listening outside their door. “Or maybe him and Mom will give a party—no, I’m sure they’ll—I mean you wanna come? Do you—you’d be invited, you know.” There was just enough emphasis on the _you_ for Phillip to understand David meant Brandon would not be; the Kentleys liked him because he was charming, but David would not want Brandon sitting there sneering and making fun of him in ways that would entirely go over his head. Phillip wondered if David had even registered that he had not spoken to Brandon since moving into David’s room. 

“Sure,” said Phillip, though of course he didn’t. “Yeah, maybe.” He was suddenly very tired; he could see David’s throat flexing like he was gearing up to say other things extolling the virtues of Harvard and Phillip could not bear it. When he stood David almost dropped his acceptance letter. 

“You’re not leaving _now—”_

“I’m afraid I just remembered I need to practice,” Phillip said, holding up his sheet music. This was not entirely a lie; he’d fallen behind in Advanced Piano II just within the first month and the professor kept threatening to give him an Unsatisfactory and throw him out of the class. 

“Oh,” said David. He was looking at the music with just enough of a twist to his mouth so that Phillip would understand he still disapproved of his major—as though David had any right to talk about it or anything else Phillip chose to do. As though David still considered himself Phillip’s better in some inane way. “All right. Yeah, I’ll call my dad.” He tugged on his hall slippers. “Catch up with you later?”

_We share a room,_ Phillip did not say. Instead only he nodded. He grabbed his scarf off the bedpost again and walked out without bothering to wrap it around his neck. In the hall away from the phone he paused leaning against a window for a moment just to breathe; the glass was frozen against his neck. 

~

There had been one single awkward call to Rupert since the incident back in December in which Phillip—drunk, crying—had yelled at him from inside a closed phone booth two blocks from his aunt and uncle’s at six in the morning on the day following Christmas when most of the world was asleep and would not see or hear. He’d accused Rupert of everything—the sex, Brandon being angry, etc.—and Rupert had listened and then told Phillip he was being very immature and perhaps should come to Somerville and speak with him in person. But Phillip knew what he meant or anyway what he thought he meant and drunk or sober he knew he would never ever want that from Rupert again. So he hung up. Since then he had not heard from him. He wondered if Brandon had, or if Brandon had himself attempted contact. It was very painful to realize that it was no longer Phillip’s privilege to know the answer to either of those questions. 

~

The piano room was by far the most comfortable room in the music building; it was in the basement such that even in the middle of the day during the summer the instrument did not get warm. It smelled perpetually of dust and of ivory and old paper and there was a sort of constant hum in the air from the strings which were tightened each week by the piano tuner who lived three blocks away. There were other instruments in the corners leaning against the walls but the students who used them would come in and take them elsewhere. And Phillip never saw anyone else who practiced at the piano though he knew there were other students in his class. 

When he walked in with his sheet music tucked under his arm he saw a shadowy figure sitting on the dust-covered couch in the corner—its cushions had at some point perhaps been a full blood red but were now a faded sort of pink like dying roses in winter. The person was sitting half-lounged against the back with the ankle crossed over the knee and smoke coming from the general direction of the mouth and after a beat Phillip realized who it was. 

“What are you—” He stopped. Cleared his throat. The ember glowing at the end of the cigarette moved a little.

“I’m n-not stalking you or anything, if that’s what you think,” Brandon said. He moved so that his face was fully visible in the grayish light. As they shared no classes and as David’s room was closer to one set of stairs than the other they had had no reason to even so much as see each other—Brandon showered in the mornings, and Phillip in the evenings—in the past weeks. So seeing him felt a little like being shocked in the chest. The familiar cold intelligent eyes and the soft mouth with its faint perpetual amused twist at the corner and the way he relaxed into everything like he owned it all and was loaning it to whatever various institutes out of societal politeness.

“I don’t,” said Phillip, “but I mean you—you don’t—” He gestured at the piano. Brandon sniffed, tapped his ashes out on the cushion. 

“This is the only place where I can ever think,” he said. Indeed often he had come here with Phillip on late weekend nights when neither could sleep and Phillip would practice soft pieces and Brandon would sit on the floor or lean against the wall and read—Phillip wanted to ask if he was remembering that too, but he didn’t dare. Instead he said: 

“Yeah. I know what you mean,” and Brandon did something that wasn’t a smile or even the beginnings of one but the hint was still in his face. 

Phillip sat on the piano bench and set his music on top. For a moment they sat not-quite staring at each other. Then shockingly Brandon produced his pack of cigarettes and held it out to Phillip who took it gingerly with his thumb and forefinger. He shook one out and lit it and stared at the brick wall scored with years of students scratching their initials and curse words in small letters near the baseboards and little white marks that could have meant anything from boredom to perhaps illicit trysts performed after hours in some years previous. Not knowing what else to say he said: 

“David’s transferring,” and Brandon laughed, surprised sharp sound. 

“Finally,” he said, and Phillip smiled a little. 

“He put in while—I mean I never saw him send the letter but he must have because he got his acceptance today. He was waving it in my face for five minutes.”

Brandon breathed out. “I suppose the old man is thrilled.”

“He was going to call him when I left,” Phillip said, and Brandon laughed again.

“You walked out while he was still talking?”

_Do you approve?_ “Yeah, basically. I told him I had to come here and—” he waved his hand at the piano. “Which I mean is not untrue but I also didn’t know how to get him to shut up.”

Brandon was tracing the creases of his pack with the tip of his index finger. “His roommate is a little shit,” he said. “He doesn’t go out or do anything but read Camus because he’s a foreign language studies major which—what use—and it’s like he’s sick all the time.” He sniffed again. “I feel like I’m coming down with something because of how much he’s always just—blowing his nose and sneezing. Complaining about sore throats. It’s d-disgusting.”

“So the asthma thing was real?”

“So he claims.” Brandon shrugged. “If he even sees my cigarettes on my dresser he starts screaming. I told him I live on a farm to see his reaction and he w-went on for about half an hour about pollen and animal droppings. It was just—” He rolled his eyes. “Christ. He’s worse than David.”

Phillip was fully smiling now and couldn’t stop it so he turned to the piano and pretended to shuffle his sheets around for a bit. God help him he had missed Brandon so much… “At least you can feel superior to him.”

“Yes, but at what cost?” Now they were both smiling; Phillip could hear it in Brandon’s voice. He located his Mahler unexpectedly and set it at the front. When he turned back Brandon was watching him. Gradually it grew quiet enough to be a little uncomfortable and then Phillip took a breath and pushed his hands on his thighs and said:

“It’s good to see you, Brandon.”

Brandon didn’t go for things like pleasantries or small talk so he didn’t say anything in response but he nodded a little like to himself and lit another cigarette (he had taken the pack again for himself) with his hands faintly trembling in the half-dark. Then he said, “I—that is, y-you. You c-could come back, if you wanted.”

This was so unexpected that Phillip’s hand which was still resting somewhat against the piano slipped and smashed the keys. For several seconds the air rang with a discordant echo during which he tugged at his sleeves. 

“I can?” he asked finally.

“Sure.” Brandon shrugged. “I’m sure Charles won’t mind going back with David—”

“No, I mean—you aren’t… uh. You aren’t angry with me anymore? About—” He didn’t want to say Rupert’s name, so he gestured again, a little pathetically. 

“…N-No,” Brandon said. It didn’t sound exactly like a lie but also not entirely the truth. Phillip wondered if it exhausted Brandon that he couldn’t hide anything from him, or if it was something of a relief to relax the constant façade around at least one person. 

“Brandon—” 

“No, I’m not angry, Phillip.” He sounded tired. “I—it happened. It wasn’t, we weren’t h-having a very good time.”

“Well, no, but—”

“In the end I realized I c-can’t compete with, with someone like him. So it’s okay.”

What—

“What do you mean, you can’t compete with someone like—”

“He’s Rupert,” Brandon said, as though this were all the explanation needed. As though he had not just said the last thing in the world Phillip would have ever expected for him to say. 

“Look.” Brandon was speaking suddenly very rapidly, perched on the edge of the sofa, hands clasped over his knees, earnest. “I don’t know what, I haven’t felt like I’ve known what I was doing since we started here. Not with—” he waved his hand—“not with academia or anything, just—fuck, Phillip, I like you s-so… I like you in a way we aren’t allowed. So I’ve been—with Janet, because I didn’t… I know you don’t like to hear this but I d-didn’t know what else to do, but then R-Rupert… obviously he’s superior, he can g-give you… n-naturally you’re going to prefer him over—” 

Abruptly he stopped, his cheeks flushed with high color, but Phillip of course knew what he meant. The same crushing jealousy he’d felt since freshman year at Somerville. Brandon did not react well when he thought he’d lost something he wanted. And Brandon rarely wanted things of his own volition with no ulterior motive. It was the same as it had always been: he needed Phillip. It felt a little like being twisted from the inside by some pressurized force, the responsibility of being valued with such intensity—

“You think I like Rupert, that I want Rupert more than I want you?”

Brandon set his mouth. Holding his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger he took in three long drags of it and blew the smoke out so that it caught in the weak lights overhead in sickly blue-gray tendrils. Then he nodded. He looked miserable.

“Why on earth would I—” Phillip stopped. His voice was too sharp and cornering and already he could see Brandon retreating into himself in that defensive way Phillip doubted he was conscious of. In another few moments unless something about Brandon’s essential being had changed drastically in the last month which was doubtful considering his previous actions he would get up and walk around holding himself taut in the shoulders and neck and say flippant, angry things with an increasing stutter in his voice, and they would come to yelling because they always came to yelling, and then Brandon would walk out and probably never speak to Phillip again in his lifetime. So instead Phillip closed his eyes and breathed out—he’d discovered it worked momentarily when David was being aggravating—and when he looked again Brandon was staring at the wall and his eyes were shining. 

“I don’t want anything to do with Rupert Cadell,” Phillip said. “I’ve spoken to him once since that night and then it was to yell at him for taking you away from me.”

Brandon’s brow was tense. Phillip ached to smooth it out with his fingers. “He didn’t—”

“You left because you thought I wanted him more. And he suggested the whole thing to start with so yeah, it’s his fault.”

Brandon touched his mouth. Thinking. “He’s v-vastly sup—”

“No,” said Phillip. He said it loud enough that Brandon actually shut up and turned to him. “I like you—fuck. Remember the barn last year? What you told me?”

Brandon shrugged, which meant yes, so Phillip said, “Well, you’re the one being dense now. I don’t want anyone else except you, you idiot.” His hands were shaking so he clamped them around his thighs. “I’ve never wanted anyone or anything else, Brandon. How—god, after all these years. How can you not know that?”

Again Brandon’s mouth moved in the ghost of a smile. He stood and walked over to the piano bench and sat beside Phillip and their thighs pressed together and Phillip thought he might die from the contact. When Brandon turned to look at him he realized that even with the door half-open as it was Brandon was going to kiss him. And it felt like moving a cement truck with his bare hands but he managed to turn his head away before that could happen.

“What—”

“I can’t,” Phillip said. “I—not with Janet still around. That just—I can’t do that anymore.” Brandon opened his mouth like to protest and Phillip said, “I get why—I mean I understand your reasoning, your explanation. That you felt trapped, or feel trapped, or whatever the current situation is. But I just—I don’t like that. I don’t want you doing that anymore.” He was thinking, please understand, please don’t walk away… His heart was racing so hard he thought it might fly from his throat. After a moment he felt something on his fingers and he realized belatedly that it was Brandon’s own hand. 

“All right,” he said, and at first Phillip thought he’d misheard because there was no way— But then Brandon said, “This weekend, will you come up to Boston with me? So I can tell her and y-you’ll know that I said it?”

His throat stung; his eyes were wet. Thus it was several minutes before he could get out his acquiescence to the whole thing, but it was fervent and accompanied by much nodding until Brandon told him to stop because he looked ridiculous. Yet he was smiling. They both were. He gave Phillip a cigarette and Phillip turned on the bench with it in his mouth and played his Mahler—Brandon’s favorite—while Brandon sat with his eyes half-shut listening… Occasionally he would take the cigarette from between Phillip’s lips and let Phillip exhale and his fingers would brush against Phillip’s mouth.

~

**vi.**

In Boston they met Janet by arrangement at a park unpopulated by anyone except two very old ladies walking along the path in the distance and tossing bread to some ducks. The three of them sat on a bench together. Janet had a Coke and her nails were painted a lurid shade of red to match her dress. She sat unsmiling through the explanation and the breakup but when it was over rather than yell or cry she surprised them both by shrugging her thin shoulders. 

“I knew,” she said. Then she took a long sip of Coke. When she was done she laughed a little at their expressions in a soft, self-deprecating way. “My older brother likes men,” she said, “and anyway even if he didn’t you two are about as subtle as a bull in a china shop.”

Brandon glanced at Phillip with his eyebrows lifted: _see what I mean?_ —He hated clichés, they were redundant and dull and once he’d dented the wall in their room at Somerville because he’d read one in a book. Phillip bit down on his smile. 

“It’s all right,” she said, and patted Brandon’s knee. “Only let’s stay friends, shall we? I’m afraid I don’t have many of those here.” Turning to Phillip: “That girl—Susie?”

“Oh, yes, I’m sorry I was so rude—”

“Oh, don’t bother. A week after all that happened she and I got in a huge fight and she called me a slut among other things and spilled all her makeup on my schoolwork on purpose. Two days before exams.” She patted his knee, too. “I wanted you to know I wasn’t angry at you anymore.”

Again he glanced at Brandon. Brandon just looked amused so Phillip nodded: “Thank you,” he said. It wasn’t just for her forgiveness, and he could see she knew it. After a moment she smiled; the lines about her mouth were sad. She squeezed his arm. Then the three of them walked back towards the city where they all bought Cokes and cigarettes at a five-and-dime and Phillip and Brandon touched the backs of their hands between them at the cash register while Janet flirted with the salesclerk.

**_Spring 1945_ **

When he had just turned fourteen briefly Phillip thought he was going to die. It was in the last dire stretches his father had made at saving the farm after it had started becoming apparent that the oil was drying up and the money was not coming in—he’d hired several of the sons of the men with whom he worked to help around in exchange for various goods. Possibly he’d hoped that he could somehow rid himself of whatever debts he was beginning to fall under at the time. Phillip hadn’t really understood it; on the farm his parents did not explain much to him except what his chores were and what they expected him to get done in spite of his schoolwork (often said in a voice contemptuous as David’s own would be years later discussing Phillip’s major at Columbia). So it was that he was in the barn one morning just before dawn with sweat already broken upon his neck and the stench of manure in his nose when the door had creaked open. For a moment there was an unfamiliar shadow; then one of the sons of his father’s coworkers stepped inside. He was three years older than Phillip and had dropped out of school the year previous because his grandmother was sick and they couldn’t afford to care for her and send him on the ten mile ride into town every week.

“Hey,” he said. “Didn’t mean to startle you; I just needed to grab some hay. Gonna feed the horses.”

When he bent over to lift the bale off the ground his back shifted beneath his shirt. The muscles flexed in a certain way like tense dancers beneath the fabric and the skin and Phillip’s sweat took on a new edge. His mouth was suddenly dry and it was very difficult to look away. Recently he’d begun having odd dreams centered mainly around hard male shapes which flitted through his mind; he’d thought it was a fluke, because he didn’t see girls much on the farm or elsewhere. His father was always teasing him about the following year when he’d go to the high school and there’d be a few coed classes, or perhaps all of them would be, and he’d get “a little girlfriend” to bring home to his mother. But this—this was entirely new. And his dreams suddenly were not enough to explain, to describe the way he felt looking at this son of his father’s coworker. 

When the boy straightened up his hair—blond and thicker than Phillip’s and a little bit wavy—fell across his forehead. He had a smattering of sandy freckles on his nose which as the sun rose to their east showed up in soft reddish gradient. He looked at Phillip for a moment—then he smiled. He hoisted the hay on his shoulder and Phillip stared at the way his arm moved with no effort at all. 

“See you around, kid,” he said, and walked out still smiling. Leaving Phillip to stand dumbstruck with the shovel clasped loosely in his hand until it fell into the manure with a sick wet sound. 

~

The boy’s name was James. There was a weird tension like something frying between them all summer. Phillip looked for excuses to do his work where James was; on the days when James did not come because of his grandmother or some other reason Phillip felt cheated out of something. They did not much speak, but Phillip liked to watch the way his teeth caught in his lower lip when he was thinking of the most advantageous way to go about some or another chore. When he’d wipe the sweat off his forehead it left a streak of dirt that Phillip wanted to brush off with his own hand. His dreams featured a lot of James shirtless in his father’s truck, or wiping the horses down after their work. Phillip’s mother brought out water for the men to drink during the heat of the day and James had a particular way of twisting his wrist when he tilted the glass back—the water dripping down his chin—that made Phillip ache between his legs. 

Two weeks before Phillip was to return to school for his eighth grade year James had cornered him in the barn before he was supposed to leave for the day. His shirt was only halfway buttoned up and he was breathing heavily because he’d been repairing a tractor with Phillip’s father for the better part of the afternoon. In the dusk he looked not-altogether real. 

He said, “You’re something else, kid,” kind of shaking his head. He reached out to brush the hair off Phillip’s forehead and Phillip went totally still beneath his hand. James slid his fingers down to rest beneath Phillip’s jaw where the pulse was speeding like a train engine under his skin. They did not exactly kiss—it was more like a brushing of their mouths together, not quite in full contact. James sort of breathing unsteadily with his nose pressed to Phillip’s cheek. He smelled of sweat and shit and Phillip did not know what he was doing except that he wanted his hands under James’ shirt. But when he reached for the hem James backed away blinking. Quietly he said:

“You can’t tell my father—”

“I’m not an idiot,” Phillip had snapped. He was half-hard and irritated; so many things had irritated him that summer, not the least of which was the constant want coursing in his veins. 

James sighed. “I never said—” But then he drew himself up. Still blinking he walked to the door; he paused with his fingers gripping the edge. 

“I’ll be back next summer,” he said, and Phillip shrugged: I don’t care. But he’d watched James and his father drive away in their truck until the taillights were burning suns on the horizon. Then he’d gone into his bedroom and wept into his pillow. 

The following summer James did not come back until mid-August. By that point Phillip was fifteen and knew what he liked and didn’t know how to fix it. If it could be fixed at all. When James showed up it was overcast like to rain; the humidity in the air was so thick Phillip had trouble breathing. The horses would not go out and as such Phillip’s father had relegated him to working on cleaning out his grandfather’s silo; they were going to try putting it to use again. He was standing beneath the rafters with hay in his shirt itching at his skin when James had walked in, silent; Phillip dropped his tools and threw his arms around him (James had starred in no less than five of Phillip’s most detailed dreams over the past year). James had bitten his earlobe and Phillip had dug his fingers into his hips and James had worked Phillip’s pants open and was wrapping a thick hand around him when the door to the silo burst open and Phillip’s father came in, yelling about the chicken coop not being closed properly— When he saw Phillip and James he drew up short. For a moment no one said anything. Then Phillip’s father had grabbed his rifle from where it leaned against the wall and James had rushed out. After that there was not much to say—the aunt and uncle in Manhattan whom Phillip had not seen since he was four were called; they wired money out for Phillip to catch a train. Phillip packed and his father stood in the doorway breathing hard and occasionally shouting at him; once he’d thrown a whiskey bottle that shattered against the wall behind Phillip’s head. 

Through it all his mother had not said a word. And on the day he was to leave she hadn’t even looked at him, even when he said, “Mama—” with his voice cracking as it was wont to do with increasing regularity. His father had driven him to the train station because no one else would—when they’d arrived they’d sat for a moment in the car and then his father said:

“If you ever call here—if you ever even write a letter I will kill you. I never want to see you again, do you understand me?” 

“Yes, sir,” Phillip mumbled. His father struck him across the face; a moment later he was standing alone in the blistering sun watching the car turn in the parking lot and rumble away. The ticket taker had sneered at his hay-covered clothes and his battered suitcase; his cheeks when he looked at himself in the bathroom were sunburnt and his nails were dirty but there was not much he could do about either thing. He’d sat nearly alone in the car on the ride up to New York, vomiting twice from nerves as they got closer. In Manhattan when his aunt and uncle met him she cried and held him close to her chest for a long time. His uncle patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. The both of them asked how his trip was. When they told him they’d gotten him a place at Somerville he burst into tears. 

~

Brandon was leaning against the sink in his mother’s downstairs bathroom. In the early dawn light he was shirtless; there was a reddish mark at the base of his throat from the night before. It was exactly the shape of Phillip’s mouth; seeing it filled him with a sense of possession. He had his chin tilted slightly and was shaving and there was a little curve to his mouth like he found something amusing. Watching him from the edge of the bathtub where he sat perched half-awake in his pajama bottoms Phillip was reminded of a painting—perhaps a statue, like the ancient kinds in decaying museums in Rome. 

Brandon paused with the razor against his skin. “I can feel you watching me,” he said, but gently. They’d each woken not half an hour previous and his voice was still rough with sleep. There was a certain vulnerability to him at this hour and also right before he slept that Phillip could not get enough of though they’d shared a room now every year since they were sixteen. 

“You like it,” Phillip murmured back. “You’re smiling.”

Brandon shrugged. His mouth twitched a little; a moment later Phillip was standing and walking over to press his forehead against Brandon’s arm where the skin was warm and dry and tasted clean when Phillip kissed it. Brandon said, “I’m shaving,” but made no move to shake Phillip off. For a long time they stood there breathing together with their feet cold on the tile floor. Phillip closed his eyes and focused on not much except the familiar scent of Brandon’s aftershave and the taut muscles in his stomach. When he moved his fingers over the skin there Brandon shivered and cursed; he’d cut his jaw. Phillip leaned up to kiss the bloody place of it and Brandon exhaled and turned his head so that he met his mouth instead. His fingers wound their way into Phillip’s hair; he maneuvered them a little until Phillip was pressed against the sink with his pajama bottoms riding just low enough that the base of his spine touched cold ceramic. They kissed tasting of toothpaste and the faint tannic flavor of Brandon’s blood. And Phillip thought probably no one else had ever been in love so much as he was now. 

~

They’d fucked for the first time last summer in the upstairs bedroom where Phillip had by that point stayed so often he no longer referred to it as the guest room anymore. It had been two weeks before Phillip’s birthday and the air was still and hot with steam rising from the gravel road leading to the house and the only sounds in the world were the crickets outside and the faint noises of the animals in the barn. He’d been lying half-awake staring at his ceiling when the door had creaked open and Brandon walked in. They sat together for a while talking in undertones about nothing in particular; eventually Brandon curved his hand against the back of Phillip’s neck and drew him in. When they kissed there was a sharp urgency to it Phillip did not recognize. It was such that after a while he had to muffle the noises he was making into Brandon’s mouth. Brandon’s hands were on his hips on his shoulders in his hair—he got Phillip on his back on the mattress and Phillip arched into him not caring how desperate he seemed. His heart was pounding like to break his ribs. 

Brandon’s hand had gone down between Phillip’s legs. When he pressed in Phillip jolted. “Do you want to?” Brandon asked, whispering mostly against Phillip’s mouth. Phillip had nodded, shifting his legs open; Brandon pulled his underwear off and then his own and then from his discarded pants upon the floor he produced a small blue glass bottle containing some or another cream. 

“Someone’s been reading the _Symposium,”_ Phillip whispered, and Brandon pinched his side:

“S-Shut up.” But he was laughing; they both were. Momentarily he’d tucked his head against Phillip’s shoulder. There was a lot of kissing and frantic confused fumbling—eventually they figured it out. Phillip refused to try and remember what Rupert had done. Brandon did not ask. When he got inside Phillip all the way there was a moment Phillip thought he might start crying from the magnitude of having a person he loved and needed and desired inside him. Brandon was looking down at him with his head silhouetted in the dim moonlight; the inside corners of his eyes looked purplish. 

“Okay?” he said. “Is this—” and Phillip pressed his heel into the small of Brandon’s back to push him in closer. It was very selfless and very humbling to be this close to another. At the height of it there was a sensation like a golden spool unraveling within the self, an atavistic dual unmaking and Phillip could not have captured it with anyone else and he would not want to, and Brandon’s teeth sunk into his shoulder, where later the mark would bruise in violet gradient…

Afterwards they’d opened the window all the way and sat together on Phillip’s mattress smoking Brandon’s cigarettes and shivering a little as the sweat cooled on their bodies. Phillip took Brandon’s hand from the sheets and kissed his fingertips; his skin was overheated and flavored with salt. 

“Better,” Phillip murmured. 

Brandon smiled; exhaled smoke into the night. “Good,” he said. It was the only acknowledgment of the incident either of them would ever give. And though they’d made up fully in the months since their conversation in the piano room it felt at last like Phillip could breathe properly. Like a puzzle fitting—except that the pieces were jagged and cut each other. But Phillip all the same wanted nothing else. 

~

After breakfast Phillip spoke for a bit with Mrs. Shaw while Brandon snuck a bottle of her vintage wine out of the pantry. They went together out to the lake with the wine and their cigarettes in loose shirts with the sleeves rolled and heavy jeans the cuffs of which dragged across the dirty ground. Phillip was barefoot and his toes dug into the silt and the weeds which surrounded the water. Overhead the sun was crawling steadily towards its zenith; the heat of it touched the back of Phillip’s neck. 

The wine left their mouths sticky. Phillip gripped Brandon’s hand between them nearly buried in the mud and they each drank from the bottle passing it back and forth with the opening wet and tasting of their shared spit and the bitterness of the drink. Brandon glanced in the direction of the house and apparently finding it empty leaned in to kiss Phillip’s neck. It was so soft and tender like to make Phillip cry. They kissed a little tasting of nicotine and the sweet-sour wine flavor. Brandon put his hand on Phillip’s knee, his nails ragged and sharp through the fabric of the denim. 

When they heard the voices of several farmhands coming up from the fields they pulled away; a while later they staggered to their feet light-headed from the smoke and flushed from the wine, laughing and shoving at each other, Phillip swaying leaning nearly all his weight into Brandon. They put their shoes on and walked the five miles into town in their dirty clothes with their hair a little messy at the edges. Brandon’s mother wanted chicken for dinner and as such they went to the store and bought for her celery and oil and paprika, and a small bag of oranges, and then cigarettes and chewing gum for themselves. The post office had a letter for Brandon from Kenneth who was at Princeton now which he read to Phillip on the walk back while they tossed the oranges in the air and peeled and ate the ones that fell to the ground. The most interesting news in the letter was that there had been another USO dance, and Kenneth had gone—

“‘—and I met your Janet,’” Brandon read, laughing; Phillip dropped another orange, which made both of them laugh more. “‘She’s really quite lovely—’ Phillip, Kenneth’s dating Janet.”

“No,” Phillip said. 

“He is; they’ve been going steady since March.” Brandon stuck the letter in his pocket and slung an arm around Phillip’s shoulders; his skin was warm from the sun and dirty on the back of Phillip’s neck. “Can you imagine, little Ken Lawrence with Janet fucking Walker?”

“Can you imagine, Ken Lawrence fucking Janet Walker?” Phillip said, and they both broke into laughter. They were still laughing when they got back to the house, where Mrs. Shaw stood on the front porch with her hands clasped in front of her and an odd set to her mouth. 

“Phillip, sweetheart…” She reached out to him. “Come here for a minute, will you?”

“Yeah, Mom?” (It had been a conscious decision to begin calling her as such; she’d cried, and Brandon hadn’t said anything but Phillip had seen him biting a smile down into his cheek, so he’d known it was all right.) He shifted from under Brandon’s loose grasp and walked up the steps with the remaining oranges in his hand. “What is it—”

“It’s your aunt on the phone,” she said. “She wants to talk to you.”

~

The thing which had killed his mother, Phillip learned, was not so much the heart attack itself as the fact that no ambulance had driven out to the farm in time. Privately he thought that no ambulance would have driven out anyway, as it was doubtful that his parents could have afforded the ride or the hospital or anything else. But his aunt said if the ambulance had come his mother would have lived. According to the coroner’s report it had been a massive heart attack—but there were machines that could fix that. And his mother had not smoked nor drank nor done anything so much unhealthy in fifty-four years. His thoughts drifted as they had on occasion over the years to the last year he’d spent with her—mostly in his room studying, resenting her constant nagging— _Phillip, have you counted the eggs; Phillip, could you please wash the plates more carefully; Phillip, don’t leave your things out like that; why don’t you pay more attention in math class; why don’t you write better papers for English; why did Tommy Pickford make an A on his history essay and you made a B minus_ —hating that she hovered when he couldn’t bear her presence and drifted away when he wanted her. That he couldn’t speak to her about the feverish dumb longing he felt for James and for select other boys at the school and even a little for his seventh grade science teacher. Fighting with his father over the things he’d done at the farm and her standing in the background with her eyes closed like to block the stress—

“—and I’m sorry, baby, I tried to get your father to wait, but the funeral was last week,” his aunt said. 

It was like something juddering weakly against the dull nothing in his chest. There might have been impact enough for Phillip to feel but as it was his aunt’s words on the phone were already echoing in a blurred muted way like hearing her talk from underwater. 

“Oh,” he said, and leaned against the doorjamb.

“I’ve got the bedroom set up if you want to come back to our house for a while—”

“No,” Phillip said, “no.” If he saw his aunt he thought he might start crying and never stop. Her face about the eyes and mouth and nose was so similar to his mother’s they might have been twins. Sometimes in the early mornings when he’d stayed at the townhouse for Christmas if he saw her in the half-dark there was always one disoriented moment where he nearly said: _mama?—_

He pressed his hand to his mouth. The wine had settled wrong in his stomach and he was queasy and sweating. There was not much else to say except the repeated phrase: I’m so sorry. It felt like nothing. The pain was confusing and sharp—he hadn’t seen her now in six years. And she hadn’t tried to stop his father from sending him away and she hadn’t written or called or done anything to reach out—

He hung up while his aunt was still mid-sentence. Mrs. Shaw pulled him to her; he stood numb in the circle of her arms for several minutes watching the hall clock tick. The second hand seemed slowed by some outward force, and much too loud. Brandon stood with his mouth a little open beside them; his irises were dark and uncertain. Eventually Phillip excused himself and went to the bathroom to wash his face. 

~

When he stumbled back outside—ignoring Brandon’s quiet, “Phillip—” and Mrs. Shaw’s, “Honey…”—the sun was fully overhead. Late spring light, golden, almost weighted. Falling onto the grass and the trees and the barn in the distance and the fields beyond that. He’d grabbed the mostly-empty bottle of wine on his way out and Mrs. Shaw hadn’t commented and as he fumbled his way down the stairs he tossed it back against his lips. His mouth was slick and hot. In his head his heart seemed to pound directly against his brain. One single thought consumed him:

_The chickens. I have to get the chickens. Brandon’s mother needs the chickens._ It was a very singular directive. It would fix—something. He didn’t know what. Beneath his feet the ground was soft and warm and he could hardly believe how beautiful it could still be outside on a day like today. His mother dead two weeks and he’d only just found out. His mother buried in some cemetery in Oklahoma beneath the sifted dirt with a single carven stone to mark that she’d ever lived. Soon it would grow over with moss. Soon no one would even know she’d ever existed. It was hard to believe that the fact of his liking cock was what had prevented his going to the funeral. 

There were a few scrawny chickens pecking around near their coop when he approached it with the wine bottle dangling from his hand, the glass hot from the sun and condensed on the inside from his breath and from the liquid. He’d rolled his jeans up on the way back from town and his ankles were bare in the pale heat of day. He was wearing a jacket which he’d kept here since his first summer at fifteen; as such it was now too small for him and he had to shrug his shoulders up a little so as to have room in the sleeves in which to move his arms. In one corner of the yard which was mostly dirt so their feed would be visible there was a plump chicken with long white feathers and reptilian yellow legs. It strutted and in the heat with the wine awash in his brain Phillip suddenly hated that creature more than he’d ever hated a thing in his life. He set the bottle down in the grass and got down on his hands and knees—muscle memory from years ago—and began to crawl forward. The wine splitting the world a little into a haze…

The chickens when they saw him scattered. The fat one arched its head to the side and stared with one squinty eye—in his mind like screaming Phillip heard his mother’s voice: _Phillip, where are my eggs?_ and his father laughing: _Are you really afraid of a goddamn chicken?_ In truth it was their beaks—they liked to jab at his hands with the points and as a child often he’d come into the house crying with cut fingers. His mother had been the one to wrap the wounds up; his mother had been the one to teach him to approach them on the ground, from behind—to lunge suddenly—

His stomach hit the ground when he grabbed at the chicken the first time. Dust exploded into his eyes and his nose and sneezing violently he scrambled up and snarled, “There’s only so fucking far you can go, you shit.” The fat chicken was waddling back towards the coop when Phillip dove in again. This time his hands caught tight around the fat body and he carried it wiggling and squawking towards the half-rotted stump on which Mrs. Shaw had her chickens’ heads cut off. The ground surrounding it was perpetually soaked in blood. 

Phillip felt the chicken squirming; he seized it harder about the face. When he was at the stump he knelt in the bloodied dirt and squeezed the chicken which was screaming at the top of its lungs between his thighs; he wrapped his hands about its neck. They were shaking so badly from the drink he had trouble centering them. And when he tried to twist his eyes blurred over of their own volition. His mother as he’d last seen her on that last day, sitting at the kitchen table with her handkerchief over her eyes, cold cup of coffee in her hand… his mother having to sweep the glass shards of the bottle his father had thrown… his mother on the farm alone for years…

The chicken startled upwards out of his hands. Its wings beat into his face and its claws dug into his thighs and one drew blood against his wrist when he tried in vain to stop it from moving away. Clumsily he got to his feet—“oh you fucking _animal”_ —and began chasing it down. The chicken was still running towards the coop when he caught it for the third time and wrapped his arm around it in the dirt. This time with his heart pounding nearly in his eyes he twisted until he heard the familiar snap that meant the vertebrae had broken—then he grabbed at the bottle which he’d dropped several feet away. The last dregs of wine fell to the earth, mixed in with the blood. Shifting his grip on the chicken he beat the wine bottle over its body until there was nothing much left but feathers soaked in crimson and glass glinting white in the sun and the meat in pulp scattered about the yard… the head somehow had come off half-intact and a single eye stared up at Phillip. In his hand the bottle was broken down to the neck which he tossed aside before falling to the bloody dust and vomiting. He was still kneeling with his hands clenched about his knees and raw unbelieving screams torn from the very core of him when Brandon came up. The familiar rough hand between his shoulders—

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Brandon said. It was an inane statement; they both knew it was untrue. But Phillip fell against him anyway, and Brandon pulled him, shuddering, soaked in blood, to his feet. 

~

“I’m fucked up,” Phillip mumbled into his arm. 

“So am I,” Brandon said, rubbing at his back. They were both sitting in the bathroom; Phillip could hardly believe this morning they’d stood at the sink and kissed with their hands in each other’s hair. He was in the tub dry with clean clothes on, mostly sober; Brandon was kneeling beside him on the tile with his brow tightly furrowed at the center. Mrs. Shaw had brought them cold cuts of ham which neither had touched; Brandon eventually had shut the door so that the dog would not smell the meat and come wandering in to look. 

“My father didn’t even… _tell_ me,” Phillip said. Wiping at his eyes. 

Brandon leaned in, pressed his nose to Phillip’s neck. It was the only contact he could stand right now. He wanted to insist Brandon get in the tub with him but he was afraid that might be too much with Mrs. Shaw and the housekeeper and the farmhands in and around the house. “We should get on a train and go to him,” he said. “Just… drop in and take care of the p-problem.”

“We can’t kill my father,” Phillip said, though the fierce insistency of Brandon’s voice made him smile a little. 

When Brandon closed his eyes Phillip felt it, the lashes brushing against his skin. He shifted to lean more against Brandon who wrapped his arm tighter around Phillip’s shoulders; briefly his lips brushed against Phillip’s hair. “It might make you feel better.” 

It was as always impossible to tell if Brandon was joking. Phillip sighed. “I really don’t think so…”

“Well, someone, then,” said Brandon. 

“I don’t know what that would do—”

“Because we’re superior,” said Brandon. “Because we c-can. Because something really… shitty happened to you today and I w-want you to remember that.”

“You want me to remember the day I found out my mom—”

“No, that’s not what I—” Brandon sighed into his skin. “I want you to r-remember you’re superior. And that you can do as you like with everyone else.”

“I am capable of just grieving, you know—”

“I know.” Brandon kissed his jaw. “I don’t mind if you do.” Subtle emphasis on _you._ Again that overwhelming sense of being important to Brandon in a way he could not quite understand… Like there were still rules but Brandon figured Phillip to be above them all simply by virtue of who he was. “But it might h-help you work off some tension…”

“I know what would really help with tension right now,” Phillip mumbled, turning his head so that their mouths would meet. Brandon laughed darkly but obliged him; Mrs. Shaw would not bother them due to everything that had happened and so they climbed the stairs to Phillip’s room and stretched out on his bed. Brandon wiped Phillip’s tears away with his thumb and sucked a mark into his neck and Phillip gripped his hips hard enough to bruise. Outside the window the moon was already setting with the sun and it sat a pale white crescent above stacks of grayish clouds limned at their edges with dull pink. When Phillip came he bit Brandon’s mouth and tasted blood. 

Afterwards, laying in each other’s arms with their winter coats on to keep from getting chilled, smoking Brandon’s Marlboros and teasing each other’s hair:

“Supposing we really did murder someone…”

“I knew y-you’d warm up to the idea.”

“I haven’t… this is just hypothetical. What if we did.”

“Okay, what if we did?”

“Well, who would you kill?”

Brandon exhaled a cloud of smoke which in the cold white glow of the moon was a filthy milk shade. “Someone who doesn’t matter,” he said. Then he smiled; Phillip could hear it without having to look, even before he spoke. “David, perhaps,” mumbled into the sweaty mess of Phillip’s hair. 

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” Phillip murmured. 

“Maybe just a little,” Brandon said; he laughed and moved onto his side and kissed Phillip with the cigarette still dangling from his fingers. 

“We could kill David,” Phillip said against Brandon’s mouth, after a moment. “It might be fun.”

“Exactly,” Brandon said, and pushed his hand up through Phillip’s hair.


	3. 1947-1948

**_1947 – 1948_ **

**i.**

After graduation Phillip went to stay the summer and the foreseeable future at the Shaw farm—his aunt and uncle had gone to Europe for three months and were renting the townhouse to some sullen individuals from Georgia who were traveling up the east coast and whose money stemmed entirely from what little was left after Reconstruction. Two weeks into his and Brandon’s post-university life—the same as it had been every summer, cigarettes by the lake and sex after midnight going slow so as to not wake anyone and Brandon starting to pick up a little of managing the farm, which it was supposed he would eventually do full-time after his mother signed the deed to his name instead of his father’s—they received a letter at the post office addressed to the both of them: _Messrs. Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan, c/o Mrs. Laetitia Shaw, P.O. Box 4781, Westfield Town, New Haven, CT._ It was from Manhattan; more specifically it was from Somerville. Phillip who had not much thought of their prep school since the incident freshman year was a little startled to see the crest at the corner of the envelope; after a moment of staring at it over his shoulder Brandon stuck his cigarette into his mouth and took it from Phillip’s hand. His eyes scanned the words; gradually his brow became increasingly pinched and after a time he let out a soft noise and thrust it into Phillip’s hand.

“It’s from R-Rupert,” he said. “He’s—there’s a p-party.”

_Dear Brandon_ (the letter began, in familiar looping script) _and Phillip, as I assume Phillip is at the house with you,_

_I am retiring from my position at Somerville so as to work more closely with what I really love which as you both know is philosophy. After the war ended I was offered a position at a failing publications house in the hopes that they could build back some revenue with the soldiers returning and such. I’ve been working both with them and at the school for a while, but as they predicted the revenue is good now and I don’t find myself teaching the same types of boys with the same vigor and enthusiasm for Nietzsche or Heidegger as you all had. So I’ve decided to work for them full time._

_I’ll be throwing a party at my townhouse on June 18. It starts at five in the afternoon. Ring me at the number below to RSVP and to get my address._

_I hope you both will make it._

_Sincerely,_

_Rupert Cadell_

“‘Same vigor and enthusiasm’,” Phillip read; the pretentious tone of the letter was awful, he could feel himself starting to shake. “More like he hasn’t been able to find boys that will lay down at his feet and kiss his ass the way we did.” The way you did, he didn’t say. After having been the only one between them to have visited Rupert’s bed it would have seemed more than a bit hypocritical. 

Brandon who was leaning against the outer wall of the post office with his cigarette held in that odd way of his turned and smiled suddenly. “We s-should go to the party,” he said. 

“Are you serious—”

“If he wrote to us he’s also written to David and Kenneth,” Brandon said. “I’d l-love to see David’s face when Kenneth talks about Janet in front of him.”

They were still dating. Sometimes Phillip found that hard to believe. Janet had written to him and Brandon occasionally in their dorm to keep them updated and there was a sort of caustic mockery with regards to certain behaviors Kenneth upheld in her presence or out of it. He could have been jealous of how alike she was to Brandon in some regards except that Brandon liked to pick apart her letters for what he referred to as “dull sentences” as he read them out loud and then mock everything she reported of her own doings until Phillip got tired of hearing it and shut him up in various ways with his mouth or his hands. He suspected that Brandon did this mainly for his benefit, especially since Janet did not write but once every four or five months, but it pleased him all the same. 

“You want to go to the party just to see David react to something he might not even really care about?”

Brandon gave him a look: _of course he’ll still care about it, he’s David._ And it was such a Brandon thing to do that Phillip couldn’t help his shrug, and a moment later also his acquiescence. Brandon’s smile widened into that familiar triumphant brilliant beautiful thing that had so often weakened Phillip over the years. 

“It might be interesting to see Rupert again, as well,” he added, after a little while. 

Phillip frowned. “If you’re going to turn this into another one of your experiments—”

“You d-don’t have any faith in me, Phillip.” 

“None at all,” Phillip said. Brandon laughed; he dropped the cigarette on the pavement and pressed it out with his heel. When he slung his arm across Phillip’s shoulders Phillip leaned as far into it as he dared. Then Brandon took the letter back from Phillip and stuffed it into his shirt, and they walked home. 

~

**ii.**

They showed up to Rupert’s party at five-thirty. There was a housekeeper who took their jackets and hats and spoke about the pate and the champagne in a way that made it obvious she’d arranged and cooked the whole thing. Also there were varied plates of other foods one of which was chicken which smelled so repulsive to Phillip he had to walk immediately into the next room; promptly he ran into David and Kenneth who were mingling awkwardly among Rupert’s colleagues. 

“Phil!” David exclaimed, when he saw him, slinging an arm heavily across his shoulders. Amid the dim murmur of philosophers his voice was violent; a moment later Brandon had joined them as well. _Phil?_ he mouthed, with his eyebrows raised, amused. Phillip took a sip of his drink so he wouldn’t smile. 

“Brandon,” said David. The tone of his voice suggested that he hadn’t been expecting him to show. He removed his arm from Phillip’s shoulder to sort of clap Brandon on the arm and Brandon glanced down at his hand and then back to his face with his chin tilted slightly. For a moment the tension was vibrating between them, the mutual dislike palpable—just last week Brandon and Phillip had lain in bed not-quite joking about killing David. It had sort of been a thing on and off for two years now and Phillip wasn’t sure how serious Brandon actually was except when he got that particular look on his face. And then of course Phillip would remember their conversation at Somerville: _If I was going to kill someone, I’d want it to be for something… oh, more important to me than just war._

“David,” said Brandon, equally cool. Then he let out a sound not exactly a laugh. “How’re things going at Harvard?”

David blinked. “Uh. Well. You know. They’re—they’re going.” He glanced at Kenneth as though perhaps he thought that would be of any help; Kenneth was just standing beside him, looking as he always had like he wasn’t quite sure how he’d arrived wherever he was. Phillip had always been under the vague impression that Kenneth wished Brandon and David would get along better so that the four of them could have some kind of camaraderie.

“You still studying the same thing?” Phillip asked David, and Brandon laughed into the inside of his wrist. 

“Well, of course, my father wants me to go in for psychology,” David said. “But I’m not especially—” _eck-specially—_ “fond of the idea myself. I did try it for a little while sophomore year right when I first got there but then I—uh, I switched to philosophy, and then back to lit, and now…” He sighed; Phillip watched him move a little ways away from Brandon. “I’m in general studies,” he said.

“Oh, huh,” said Phillip, taking another sip of his drink and shoving Brandon in the ribs when he felt him take in a breath to speak. “That’s—”

“I know, I know.” David waved his hand. “But all my major switching set me back a whole year for graduation. I didn’t want to keep… you know. I have to move forward. I have to get a career in something.”

“So remind me again how a general studies major is better than music theory,” Brandon said, and Phillip glanced at him, surprised by the tone in his voice. His jaw was tight; Phillip had forgotten how much all of that bothered him. Himself he had stopped thinking about it after David went to Harvard and quit sneering at him every time he showed up with his sheet music under one arm. 

David frowned. “What—”

“Well, I see I managed to get the club back together,” drawled a familiar voice behind them. Phillip suddenly was desperate for a cigarette. It had been nearly four years yet still he didn’t think he could do this. 

They all turned at once. Rupert was coming up from the kitchen with a plate of pate in his hand. His hair was a little grayer about the temples and along his hairline and sprinkled throughout the sweep of it across the top of his head; when his eyes settled on Phillip his mouth quirked as though amused and Phillip felt a flash of that old anger like a tumor returning… “Or at least for one night,” Rupert said, and stopped beside them. “How are you all?”

Brandon was smiling; Phillip couldn’t tell how much of it was affected and how much genuine. The jealousy, forever… You have him every night, he thought; they haven’t spoken in years now. But still he hated to see Brandon with Rupert, as he always had. As he supposed he always would. 

“R-Rupert,” he said, holding out the hand not occupied with his cigarette case—brand new, graduation gift from some distant aunt in Maine—to shake Rupert’s own. Phillip drained his glass and set it surreptitiously on the table beside him. “It’s b-been a long time.”

“Yes,” said Rupert, with another glance at Phillip, “it has been.”

Phillip made his mouth move in what he hoped was some approximation of a smile. “Hello, Rupert,” he said; he shook Rupert’s hand when it was offered. He was so tense it was like pinching a little at his neck and he felt Brandon who was standing beside him lightly bump their elbows when Rupert turned to greet Kenneth and David: _you okay?_

He wondered if Brandon would agree to leave if Phillip said he wasn’t. Compared to a few years ago it was more likely—but Phillip knew how Rupert would see it if they were to excuse themselves now. So he shifted his shoulders: _yeah,_ and shook a cigarette out of its pack. The five of them stood in somewhat close proximity to one another for a few minutes during which time Rupert spoke to a bearded colleague of his who was looking at Brandon in a way that made Phillip’s chest ache and David glared at Phillip every time he exhaled a cloud of smoke and Kenneth ate little bits of shrimp stuck to toothpicks. Eventually Rupert turned back to them—his _boys,_ Phillip thought, with a sort of savage disgust—and walked them to a slightly quieter corner of the room where the housekeeper was arranging some flowers in a vase.

“I hope you’re enjoying my pate,” she stage-whispered as he approached her. “I made it special for the occasion.” 

He smiled; after a moment Phillip recognized it as the same smile as Brandon wore when he thought he was speaking to a particularly unintelligent person out of whom he could get a lot of use if he only played them right. “I’m enjoying it very much,” he stage-whispered back. Then, in a regular voice: “This is my housekeeper, Mrs. Wilson. These are all boys I taught at Somerville.”

“Well,” she said. She touched her hair often; she could have been someone’s grandmother. “Not exactly boys anymore, are they, Mr. Cadell?”

“Brandon and I just graduated Columbia,” Phillip offered. 

She turned to him smiling. “So did my son, several years ago—”

“Mrs. Wilson,” Rupert interrupted, “don’t you have something in the oven?”

“Oh, well, I—” She frowned at him momentarily, then took up the vase and walked away. Once she was gone Rupert said:

“Well, Brandon,” and Phillip could see by his posture that this was what he’d been angling towards all evening. “Last time I heard about you, you were going steady with a girl?”

“Oh, J-Janet and I split ages ago,” he said. “She’s with Kenneth now,” and Phillip saw David stiffen a little like along his spine, and he thought, I’m never going to hear the end of this. 

“That was four years ago,” Rupert said. “No girl since then?”

It was unlike Rupert to grill Brandon in this way. But Brandon barely even blinked. “None worth talking about,” he said. He didn’t so much as glance at Phillip yet his hand twitched and Phillip knew he wanted this conversation to be over. He pressed a cigarette into the palm though Brandon’s case was still out and Brandon took it up with his thumb and forefinger and lit it—still he did not look Phillip’s way but shifted slightly so Phillip could step forward. Rupert was watching between them without quite making it look that way. Phillip snagged another drink off the closest table; this time it was wine, bitter and sharp in his throat, but he downed it all the same. 

“So you took Brandon’s girl,” Rupert said to Kenneth. “Well. Little Kenneth Lawrence. Who knew.”

This of course got Kenneth talking for several minutes about Janet and what he referred to as “her little pieces” she was doing for magazines like _Nash’s_ and _Bazaar_ —meanwhile Rupert was still looking half at Brandon and Phillip. And Brandon was looking back still with that cool, calculated expression and after a time it occurred to Phillip that Brandon had brought him here because Rupert did not know that Brandon knew about the incident. And so it was another game for him to watch and see if Rupert could figure it out. Like moving pieces on a chessboard… Exasperation and affection, same as it had ever been and ever would be. Phillip wondered if Brandon would ever grow up. 

Then Brandon murmured, “Hey, dreamer,” nudging at Phillip’s side, the words coated with their usual gentleness but also now a certain sense of possession, a sort of _he’s mine_ —it sent a thrill down his spine instead of making him angry. A red hot flush of taut lightning between his legs. That Brandon was here with him nearly clasping his elbow in his hand and sharing his cigarettes and Rupert didn’t even _know_ —that he belonged to Brandon at all was still in its own right a very shocking thing. Belatedly he realized everyone was staring at him. 

“What?” 

“I asked if you’re still playing the piano,” said Rupert. 

“Oh,” said Phillip. “Yes. I’m still playing,” and he glanced sideways at Brandon, and both of them burst out laughing. The wine towards the bottom of the glass began to taste sweet in a cloudy alcoholic way. David was staring at both of them and it made him want to laugh harder. 

“Any upcoming concerts?”

“No… no…” Phillip waved his hand. “I’m not that good yet.”

“I’m sure you’re just being modest.”

“I’m not, really,” said Phillip, and for the first time all evening he forced himself to fully meet Rupert’s eyes. They were the same slate shade as they’d been four years ago. It was awful to think of what he’d done. That cruel mouth on his thigh—

When the food was served Rupert walked away with a promise he’d return. The four of them stood for a while; Brandon was smoking out of his case again and after a bit David pointedly turned from him and said to Kenneth a shade too loudly:

“I introduced Janet to Brandon, you know. I bet he didn’t tell you that.”

“Oh, come on, David,” Brandon said, before Kenneth could even open his mouth, “don’t you think you should let that go? It’s been four years, and after all, we aren’t in prep school anymore.” He was smiling just underneath the practiced downturn to his mouth. “Jealousy is unattractive.”

“Oh, you’re one to talk about unattractive,” David snapped, “using that _thing_ all night—” He gestured at Brandon’s cigarette. Brandon rolled his eyes.

“Still think we should all be Puritans, huh, Kentley?”

David frowned at him. “No,” he said. “Obviously I enjoy a drink every now and then, but not—” he hesitated. Phillip thought perhaps he should change the subject, he could see the same sentiment in Kenneth’s face, but his mind wasn’t working fast enough—still stuck somewhat on Brandon facing off with Rupert, and how Rupert hadn’t even _known_ it was happening—and before he could venture some neutral remark David said:

“Anyway it’s too late for you, you know.”

Brandon would have wanted to lead a Puritanical lifestyle about as much as Phillip wished to ever see his father again, who still after two years had yet to write or call or even send word via his aunt and uncle. Yet Brandon when he was denied something became reactionary and confrontational; their junior year he’d made an A in his final science course simply because the professor had told him he didn’t have the ability. 

“What do you mean?” he asked, and drew on his cigarette. 

“Besides the obvious?” David looked him up and down; Phillip half-expected a comment about the Shaw money versus the Kentley money and was preparing himself to lash out in Brandon’s defense but then shockingly David lowered his voice and said, “I know all about what you like when you’re alone,” and he looked at Phillip. It was not friendly or conspiratorial. Instinctively Phillip’s hands went to his sleeves—

“Oh, d-do you r-really,” Brandon said; he pressed his cigarette out against something that Phillip was unsure to actually be an ashtray and took a step forward. Kenneth’s expression became alarmed and Phillip grabbed at Brandon’s elbow—

“Don’t,” he whispered. “God—not here. Please.”

Brandon was tense under his hands. “P-Phillip—”

“Remember the superman,” Phillip said, and prayed Brandon would not interpret this as his superiority giving him the right to punch David in front of all these philosophy professors. Brandon was sort of vibrating; his jaw was tight and for a moment Phillip thought he would go ahead with it anyway. But then Rupert reappeared; he was holding a plate of that chicken, and Phillip’s stomach turned. 

“Something wrong, gentlemen?” he asked.

“We’re just leaving, actually,” Brandon said, extracting his arm from Phillip’s tight grasp and turning. “Phillip isn’t—isn’t f-feeling well.”

“Oh, I am sorry to hear that,” Rupert said. “Maybe if he eats something—”

“No,” Phillip said. He was shaking a little too; he couldn’t tell what the source was. “I think we’d better just, we’d better leave now.”

“All right,” said Rupert, slowly; Phillip could see he hadn’t figured it out. He couldn’t decide if he should be disappointed or relieved. “Well, thank you both for coming.”

“Anytime, R-Rupert,” said Brandon. He held out his hand again; despite the anger and the tension he was still having a good time. “It was our p-pleasure.”

“You’re welcome to call if you like,” Rupert said, as Brandon led Phillip to the foyer. They neither of them answered; Phillip wondered if Brandon would take it as a challenge. 

Mrs. Wilson gave them their things; she was still smiling in that strange secretive way. “I hope you boys liked my pate,” she said. “It’s Mr. Cadell’s favorite.”

“Phillip actually isn’t feeling well, Mrs. Wilson,” Brandon said. “We didn’t get a chance to try it out.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Wilson. 

“Some other time, maybe,” said Phillip, inanely; he was dizzy now from the champagne and the wine on an empty stomach and from facing Rupert for the first time in four years and from his anger at David—the surprising strength of it. The heat and the edge like he was going to tip and spill onto the floor… Outside waiting for the driver to bring their car around Brandon lit up one of Phillip’s cigarettes for himself and then another for Phillip, cupping his hands around Phillip’s mouth to keep the flame steady. His fingers brushed against Phillip’s skin; in the dirty glow of the sun near the horizon with the few passersby and the window shades drawn all around them it felt incredibly dangerous and sensual. 

“I’ll touch w-whoever I goddamn please,” Brandon said. He was furious. “David fucking Kentley trying to tell me what I c-can and can’t enjoy—”

“You’ll only touch me,” Phillip corrected him. It came out more like an order than he’d intended; it made Brandon glance at him sharply. His eyes in the dim light were nearly pitch black. His tongue came out to wet at his mouth and Phillip felt something within him collapse as if from a very great height— When at last Brandon’s car pulled up it looked in the exploding setting of the sun like blood gliding down the street, or else like fire from hell, or else like all of Phillip’s desire made solid—or else Brandon was all those things, or else they were together. Brandon gave the doorman a five dollar bill and he and Phillip climbed into the car together and drove off—they stopped for the night at the Waldorf-Astoria and went up separately to their room where inside they made quick work of each other’s clothes and fucked against the wall without bothering to first close the shades. They were on some high floor and Phillip stared at the small dots of light moving below and the reflection of their bodies arching together in the glass of the balcony door. Brandon at the height of it bit Phillip’s neck and Phillip grabbed at his hip digging his nails into the skin. Afterwards they sat together on the balcony smoking and lightly touching their fingertips between them. Phillip trailed his touch up Brandon’s arm a few times; his pulse beat at the soft hot inside of his wrist like a rabbit in a warren. Phillip was sore from sex and his neck ached and he loved Brandon more than anything, enough that it scared him sometimes. 

“You bruised the shit out of me,” Brandon said. He sounded impressed. 

“What can I say,” Phillip murmured back. “I’m just good with my hands.”

~

**iii.**

They’d tried to visit the farm in Oklahoma during the summer following their sophomore year. Brandon had bought them each a train ticket and they’d ridden out together—a taxi driver had with some prompting agreed to drive them out until the asphalt road ended and became dirt. There he’d waited with Brandon’s twenty shoved deep in one pocket staring idly out the window listening to post-war news on the radio while they’d walked the extra half-mile to Phillip’s parents’ farm. 

Everything out there had looked the same, or anyway with relativity. The silo was overgrown with vines and the door rotted in; the chickens were long gone; the porch steps had sunk in so far towards the earth they were nearly buried. There was a wind turbine in back of the house where Phillip remembered the old horse stalls had stood empty for years following his grandfather’s death back in ‘28 and a well outside the barn—otherwise not much was dissimilar to how he remembered it from six years previous. But the truck was not parked there and neither was the tractor and Phillip wondered where his father was. If he was still here at all. 

They walked around for a bit, kicking at rocks with their feet, hands in their pockets. Brandon touched the sides of the house and his finger came away caked in dust and flakes of paint. Phillip found his old tricycle long unused and mostly buried ten feet away from the back porch, the handlebar sticking out of the dirt and rusted and the front wheel half-visible, shredded, withered and flat from age and from the various elements… Eventually he’d given up and pushed the back door open where he knew the lock was bad because his father had for years refused to repair it. 

Inside also it was unchanged; it still smelled like her. He made a soft choked noise into his hand and Brandon squeezed his shoulders. Together they walked into the kitchen where the window was lightly cracked so that a line of soft red dust had appeared on the sill and the dishes were stacked and dirty in the sink and drawing flies. On the table there was Phillip’s father’s accounting book open and covered in his angry notations. The curtains which his mother had hung fifteen years prior were tattered at their edges and a filthy unwashed gray color. Phillip sank down into the chair that had at one time been his and began to cry. 

Brandon had lifted him eventually up and into his arms where he held Phillip against him and smoothed at his hair like he was some skittish animal. “Show me your, your childhood bedroom,” he said. “Where you put your little head on a pillow and dreamed about all sorts of untoward things.”

Phillip shoved at him, but he was smiling, wiping at his eyes. Down the hall he showed Brandon the few photographs of the Morgan family hanging on the walls—sepia-toned filthy portraits of his maternal great-grandparents who had come from Greece and his paternal grandparents who had come from Scotland. The single photo of his own parents standing in front of the farmhouse when it had been new. Holding hands and staring with stiff wind-sore eyes at the camera. And Phillip, age five, in a chair that had not long after been chopped for kindling, holding a one-eyed teddy bear he thought perhaps had been stolen by one of the boys at school when he’d been young enough and stupid enough to bring it. 

“Huh, you were actually cute once,” Brandon remarked, laughing; Phillip pinched his arm a little and knocked his head against his shoulder and wondered at being comfortable at last in this house after twenty-odd years. The air in his bedroom was stale like it hadn’t been so much as looked at since he’d left; it gave him a nauseated claustrophobic feeling to be inside. A chill passed up his spine like a dishtowel being rung out. In the corner he thought for a second he still saw a cluster of broken glass—

“It’s small,” he said, just for something to say, but he was surprised a moment later to realize it was true. It was much smaller than he’d thought as a child. The bed alone looked hardly big enough to contain him… For a while they stood side by side staring at the bare walls and the dust-covered furniture and the dirty untouched bedsheets. Then Phillip turned and walked out and Brandon followed nearly on his heels. Outside the sun was flat and white on the dirt and against the corrugated tin roof of the silo. Phillip stood for a moment wavering in the heat—eventually he walked a ways down into the fallow fields where once years ago his grandfather had planted corn and he knelt and dug his fingers into the loose dust and the brittle soil there. For a long time he stayed crouched feeling the sun like a brand upon the backs of his neck and shoulders. Then Brandon’s shadow was thrown over him; Brandon’s hand on the back of his arm, the fingers coaxing, the voice gentle and rough with the dust and with the stillness and unreality of the place— 

“Hey, dreamer.” Just soft. Like something crushing. He stood; Brandon’s hand fell from his arm. 

“I don’t want to leave a note,” Phillip mumbled. “I don’t want him to know I was here.”

“Okay,” Brandon said. And then, “Do you know where…” He trailed off. But Phillip knew what he meant, and he shook his head:

“I think he might have figured I’d ask, because my aunt never found out herself—like she couldn’t make it to the funeral in time, and he never told her.” His face was hot in a way that was starting to become familiar; sometimes he found himself crying without meaning to. Without hardly even realizing he was thinking of her. It was like a sickness, like a virus he could not control. Again Brandon’s fingers brushed his arm and he gripped his hand so tight it cut the circulation a little. For a long time the two of them stood there in the hot wind and the dust. In the far distance across the empty stretches of nothing Phillip could see arcs of lightning move in the depths of some afternoon thunderstorm. Eventually Brandon said:

“Come on; that taxi’s gonna drive off without us,” and Phillip nodded. Together they walked back across the lawn and down the dirt road… The taxi was idling at the edge of the asphalt and Phillip and Brandon got in the backseat. He pressed for a moment his face to the glass watching to see if perhaps by coincidence his father would pull up just as he was riding off… but he did not. And Phillip watched a long time until the taxi turned at a corner and the farm and the silo and the half-mile dirt road all vanished into the dust.

~

**iv.**

They went to look at a penthouse on the sixth floor of some apartment building within walking distance of Fifth Avenue—as the landlady walked them through the rooms Phillip found himself struggling to believe any of it was real. It was still difficult to realize that he could have things like this now. How far, how unbelievably far he’d come from Oklahoma, from the dust and the vines and the unknown burial place of his mother and the thin accounting book of his father. They stood looking at the main room the window of which stretched nearly from one wall to the other and overlooked the Manhattan skyline. The buildings glittered in the distance like unknowable stars. It was impossible that he should be standing here, picturing Brandon’s mother’s Steinway in the corner and various piece of furniture elsewhere, a bookcase along one wall, and a radio, and Phillip’s aunt’s Oriental rug which she’d promised him as a gift when he moved out… As they walked back down the stairs together Brandon said:

“Do you like it?” His voice had this hopeful tilt to it Phillip almost never heard because Brandon usually just took whatever he liked for himself and assumed Phillip would want it as well simply by virtue of it being something Brandon desired… But of course this was different and by some miracle Brandon seemed to have grasped that. Phillip pressed his hand to his shoulder—it was all he dared to do even in the deserted stairwell. Then he said:

“It’s great, we should take it,” and Brandon broke into that radiant smile of his. Outside they walked to Brandon’s car which he’d parked several blocks away near the place where they’d stopped for lunch. The sun was very warm on Phillip’s neck. After a while Brandon took his cigarette case from his jacket and lit one; the smoke ringed his head. Briefly it blurred out the windows behind him. 

~

**v.**

For a week or so they stayed at the Shaw farm waiting for the acceptance call without trying to look like they were waiting. The leaves had begun to turn at the very tops of certain among the trees and they lay flat in the fields with their arms hooked behind their heads over their coats watching the clouds move in the burning brilliant sky and sharing cigarettes between them. Sometimes at night Phillip dreamed that they got the apartment but then somehow his father found him and dragged him out in the street which was of course transformed into the farm in Oklahoma—always he woke sweating and had to sneak downstairs to crawl into Brandon’s bed where he’d lie beneath the covers listening to the steady beat of Brandon’s heart—Brandon himself half-awake and grumbling at Phillip to go back to sleep even as he laced their fingers together in a loose way over his chest—until he had calmed down. 

One morning Phillip was sitting at the table with coffee and cigarettes tapping his finger along to the sheet music of some piece by a long-forgotten composer when the phone rang. Brandon was bathing and Mrs. Shaw was outside so he answered: 

“Hello?” and after a pause (the line crackling): 

“Mrs. Shaw,” drawled Rupert, “you certainly don’t sound like yourself today.”

Phillip felt cold like brittle ice running in his veins. “What do you want?” he asked. 

“Oh, and I thought we’d made up after that party I had in June.”

“You certainly assume a lot of things, Rupert,” Phillip snapped. “Is it the superiority?”

Rupert laughed. Then he said, “Can I speak to Brandon’s mother now, please?”

“I don’t know,” Phillip said, “I’ll have to go find her.” He set the phone down and headed outside; Mrs. Shaw of course was there. When Phillip told her who was on the phone she blinked and went inside. At the bathroom door Brandon stood in a towel with his hair and shoulders still damp from the water; he mouthed, _what is it?_ but Phillip just shook his head. Whatever it was, he knew, if it involved Rupert, it was going to be awful. He headed back into the foyer and waited by the stairs while Mrs. Shaw made noises into the phone and finally hung up smiling. 

“You boys—” also indicating Brandon, who had dried off somewhat and dressed in soft cotton and jeans faded from the sun—“knew he’d gone into publication?”

“We knew,” said Phillip. 

“Well, the headquarters are in Hartford,” she said. “And he’s been up there for his business—he’s heading back home now but he doesn’t think he’ll make it back to his townhouse before nightfall and so he asked if there were any hotels nearby that I knew of—”

Phillip felt the cold knife edge of something pass over his spine. He knew of course what was coming in the seconds before Mrs. Shaw said it; he closed his eyes and leaned against the banister and wished it had been the landlady at the apartment on the phone instead. Beside him he felt Brandon tense a little like reacting to his own posture—

“—and so I told him, ‘why don’t you just stay here?’ And so that’s what he’s going to do.”

Phillip opened his mouth; found he could not speak. Thusly it was Brandon who said, “W-When’s he coming in?” and Mrs. Shaw said:

“This afternoon,” and Phillip forced himself to smile:

“That’s great, Mom. Whatever we can do to help.” Half an hour later he was in the far reaches of the fields with another stolen bottle of wine from the pantry, and Brandon was sitting behind him with his cigarettes and a book of poetry he’d kept from Columbia, reading aloud: _we who were living are now dying…_ He’d caged Phillip in a little with his knees. And after a bit Phillip exhaled and leaned back against him and closed his eyes. 

~

“I know you don’t eat chicken, sweetheart,” Mrs. Shaw said. “And I wouldn’t ask you to do this at all except that it’s so very last minute and the others are all busy—”

“It’s fine,” Phillip said; he was just loose enough from the wine—not quite drunk, but a sort of drifting disconnected feeling—to not care about much of anything. He and Brandon had come in from the fields about half an hour previous and Mrs. Shaw had asked him to wring a chicken’s neck and pluck its feathers so she could have something to cook for their dinner that night. He wished there was a way he’d be able to light into Rupert when he arrived— _look what you’ve done, how you’ve disrupted the family._ But he doubted he’d be able to articulate that much. 

They were standing together at the coop; bad memories sour in his throat. The sun had begun to dip below the tree line to the west and Phillip had to turn his body away so as to avoid being blinded by the glare of it off the lake and the gravel which in the afternoons on certain days turned hot and reflective. After a moment Mrs. Shaw patted him on the shoulder and headed off to oversee her other farmhands. He took a deep breath like to steady himself and then he glared at the chickens which were strutting around. Quickly he seized one—he did not let himself think and he did not let himself slow down. It was over very quickly; the neck snapped beneath his hands in a short violent movement and he kept his eyes averted and his hands moving through muscle memory while he plucked its feathers at the same rotted bloody stump… He heard footsteps behind him and did not turn. Then the voice:

“Well, Phillip—I didn’t know you had that particular skill,” and it was with a concentrated effort that he did not allow himself to freeze. 

“If I had known you were angling to come over, I would’ve hung up on you,” he said. 

Rupert walked around him so that Phillip was forced for a moment to look up. “And let dear Mrs. Shaw see your true colors? I don’t think so.”

It felt like being put on trial for something he hadn’t done in which Rupert was judge, jury, and prosecution. “I thought you said I was bad at lying.”

Rupert started to smile. His eyes drifted down to the chicken which lay half-plucked in Phillip’s hands; beneath his fingers the flesh was still warm. The smell of blood and meat was nauseating. 

“I saw you wring its neck from inside the house,” he said. “Right as I was arriving; what a—poignant welcoming gift.”

“I can assure you, your timing is just shit,” Phillip said. He could feel himself tethering out. The wine in his stomach curdling…

Rupert said, “You have a surprising amount of strength for a pianist.”

“Thank you,” Phillip mumbled, though he wasn’t entirely sure it was a compliment. And indeed a moment later with that cruel amused look Phillip knew so well he added:

“Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised. After all in my room at Somerville—” 

It was as close as Phillip had ever heard him come to mentioning the incident. It felt like the years’-old fear of evisceration by words, like everything Rupert said was going to be somehow carried away on the wind. His hands were shaking and he found he could not steadily pluck the feathers so he stood up and wiped at the sweat which had begun to collect on his forehead. 

“Don’t talk about that,” he said. 

“Afraid Brandon will hear?” Rupert asked, and Phillip remembered that Rupert still did not know that Brandon knew. It was dull comfort. Like a Band-Aid on a raw deep wound…

“I just wish you’d leave me alone,” Phillip said. “I’m trying to—”

“Still never have learned to control those emotions, have we,” Rupert said. His mouth was thin and tight; Phillip did not know what he might have said next, except that then his gaze slid sideways and Phillip heard footsteps and then there was Brandon’s hand on his shoulder, Brandon’s voice saying:

“R-Rupert! When did you c-come in?” and Rupert turned. The touch of Brandon’s fingers was solid upon Phillip’s shoulder and when he squeezed it was with his thumb and it was minute yet it grounded Phillip enough that he could breathe somewhat normally again. As if through a fog muting sound he heard Brandon offer to show Rupert around the farm; distantly he was also aware of Brandon’s hand sliding off his arm and then by some miracle the two of them vanished. Phillip watched them walk off down the field together towards the barn—when he looked down again the chicken was bloody where he’d pulled the feathers and its eye stared up at the endless sky. He swallowed down bile which had rushed up acidic and sudden into his throat; momentarily another farmhand passed him, and Phillip caught his attention and asked if he could finish the job and bring the chicken inside to Mrs. Shaw. Then he ran to the lake and vomited surreptitiously into the weeds. 

~

At dinner Mrs. Shaw served the chicken—to Phillip she gave a single strip beside much larger portions of cold ham from the night previous which she’d saved in the icebox yet he was still queasy from earlier and the smell of it turned his stomach and as such he only picked at his food with the very edge of his fork. Mostly he smoked down three cigarettes from Brandon’s case and drank his water and nibbled at some grapes which were set prettily in fine china at the center of the table. At one point Rupert turned to him with what could have passed as a friendly smile on anyone else and said:

“You aren’t hungry?” and Phillip felt his irritation rising up. His jaw clenched. In his mind he saw again the bird in bloody mangled ruin—he pushed his plate away and stared down at his hands. The fingers were blunt at their edges and the nails bitten in and a little dirty despite he’d tried to clean them. Sophomore year at Columbia his professor had told him he needed to refine his touch else he could never play “really great” concerts. Beneath the joints and tendons of his own hands he could feel as though through a tangible dream the grist and muscle of the chicken, the easy snap of its bones within his fingers—

“Phillip and I are m-moving into our own apartment,” Brandon said. Beside him Phillip froze—carefully he remained staring down at his hands. Through the same muted fog from earlier he heard Rupert offer his congratulations. 

“In Manhattan?” he asked. Brandon nodded:

“W-We’re still waiting on c-confirmation,” he said. “But we’ll get it.” He was smiling that awful disarming thing. 

“Do you have everything set up?” Rupert asked. “Furniture and all?” 

As if he cared! Phillip glared resentfully at his untouched food. 

“We’ll need a h-housekeeper,” Brandon said, conversationally. “But other than that—y-yes.” It was not entirely true; Phillip had had to talk Brandon down from buying out half the stores in the area, in his confidence that the apartment was already theirs. And it irritated him further that Brandon was talking like trying to impress Rupert—as though still he needed that validation. He began to run his finger slowly over the slight ridges in the fork which at one time had belonged to Brandon’s great-grandmother. 

Rupert said, “You need a housekeeper, huh?” and he said, “Do you remember Mrs. Wilson?” Voice like he was chewing tobacco. It was hard to believe there had once been a time when Phillip hadn’t known him, and harder still to realize there had been a time when he hadn’t hated him. 

Brandon was nodding. Rupert continued, “Well, since I’ve taken on this job with the publishing house I’ve moved to a different place in the city and as a result I find myself less in need of any sort of help. So Mrs. Wilson is going to be leaving me at the end of this month. If you think you’ll have the apartment by then would you like me to ask her to come work for you?”

It felt like a trap. But Phillip didn’t know why. He sat with his hand on his fork feeling irritated and overwarm and the smell of chicken inescapable and Mrs. Shaw, oblivious, saying, “What a generous offer, Mr. Cadell—!” Brandon stuttering out:

“T-That would be f-fine, R-Rupert.” When he glanced over at Phillip with his eyebrows a little raised what else could he say? 

“If she’s okay with it—”

“Well, she’ll need another job, won’t she?” Rupert said, drawled, sneered, and they all laughed. Phillip listened for a moment to it softly ringing in the air like wind chimes in summer. Silver on glass... Then he closed his eyes. 

~

“Phillip—”

They were in Phillip’s room; Rupert had taken Brandon’s due to his knee and it being on the first floor. The sun had leached its last dregs from the sky hours previous. They’d all sat in the piano room and for a while listened to Phillip play various nocturnes none of which he was especially fond of; then Rupert had caught sight of Brandon’s copy of _Being and Time_ and struck up a conversation with him about that while Phillip smoked and watched the stars appear slowly. Mrs. Shaw eventually had gone to bed, and Rupert not long after her— _long day tomorrow, train leaves at seven-thirty from the station in New Haven_ —leaving Brandon and Phillip to finish off their cigarettes while Brandon read his book and Phillip pretended not to pay attention to the way he jittered a little where he sat. Then they’d gone into the bathroom and brushed their teeth side by side, Brandon leaning a little into Phillip’s space as he was wont to do, and then they’d gone upstairs and undressed. And suddenly Phillip remembered the way Rupert looked at him while he was killing the chicken, and the way Rupert had looked at Brandon when they’d discussed their Heidegger, and it was like he couldn’t breathe. 

He turned now from the window at the sound of Brandon’s voice, which was soft and cautious, as often it was when he knew Phillip was annoyed with him for some or another reason, and was feeling guilty about it. “What,” he said. 

Brandon cleared his throat. Phillip knew he wasn’t going to come right out and say it: _I know you’re angry with me._ And indeed instead after a few seconds he walked to the window where Phillip was standing in one of Brandon’s bathrobes and his own shorts and he put his hand on the sill and he said:

“It’s getting cold.” Which meant, of course, I’m sorry. Come to bed. We can discuss it in the morning. He was so predictable... Exasperation and affection. Except right now one overpowered the other and Phillip exhaled and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He wanted a cigarette desperately. Or perhaps more wine, filthy and sharp sliding down his throat. 

“Why’d you tell Rupert?”

Brandon blinked. “Tell him—”

“That we’re moving in together. Without even...” He hesitated. _Without even asking me if it was okay_ sounded so needy. But of course Brandon seized upon his hesitation.

“What’s the p-problem with that, Phillip? We a-are moving in together.”

“Yes, I know. But it’s not... it isn’t his business.”

“Oh, come on, Phillip.” Brandon was smiling a little. “It’s not like... well, you know he still doesn’t know that I know.”

“So it’s still just a game to you. Just playing around to see if he’ll figure it out.”

Brandon didn’t say anything. His fingers flexed a little against the windowsill. Phillip sighed. 

“It isn’t funny anymore,” Phillip said. “I don’t, I don’t like having him around. I don’t like that he invited himself to this house—”

“I c-couldn’t very well d-do anything about that, could I—”

“Thrusting his housekeeper on us like she’s just a, a piece of _meat—”_

“We do n-need one,” Brandon said, in that petulant voice he got when Phillip was arguing with him on something he found dull or unnecessary. “And I can’t v-very well ask Mother for hers—”

“So you _were_ angling for that.”

“I w-wasn’t.” From the desk beside him he withdrew a pack of cigarettes which Phillip hadn’t known he possessed and tugged two carefully out—another attempt at apology. Phillip didn’t want to take the one held out to him except that his hands were shaking so badly he could hardly think straight. “But it was n-nice that he offered, wasn’t it?” He lit his cigarette. When he handed the lighter over Phillip took it, hating the smile he could still see playing at Brandon’s mouth. As though this were all still somehow amusing to him. 

“I don’t think anything Rupert does is for anyone’s gain but his own,” Phillip said, and Brandon rolled his eyes.

“We’ve got h-his housekeeper now,” he said. “And w-we, we have—” He gestured between them. “And he doesn’t.” It was not something they ever spoke of except in vague passing yet still Phillip felt anger and embarrassment rise in color on his cheeks. 

“Am I just a _trophy_ to you, Brandon? To wave in front of Rupert whenever you like?”

Something in Brandon’s eyes changed. His jaw was tense against the cigarette ember glowing in the near-dark of Phillip’s room. “N-No,” he said. “That’s n-not what I m-meant and y-you know it.” His voice was that same flavor of hurt it had been in the barn four years ago, when Phillip had asked if he was stringing him along. And of course Phillip knew it wasn’t really like that for Brandon. And yet somehow it was, as though Brandon liked him, really... but he used him too. If Phillip was less irritated he might have remembered that at times he was guilty of the same. 

They were both quiet for a while. Brandon finished his cigarette and opened the window to crush the end of it out on the cold brick outside. Phillip watched his eyes in the moon as it rose over the fields. His shoulders were tense as he leaned out into the air to finish his own cigarette. After a bit Brandon touched his shoulder near the top where the skin was freckled and sunburnt. 

“You just didn’t ask,” Phillip said. “You never ask. It’s just, it’s whatever you want to do. As always.”

Brandon made a noise not quite a sigh. “Phillip...” He bent like to kiss him, his hand still light on his skin, and Phillip turned away. His heart was pounding too quickly against his ribs. The cigarette was acrid and sharp in his mouth. It was another few moments before Brandon sighed again and turned away, walking back to Phillip’s bed and laying down. Phillip closed his eyes and finished his cigarette—there wasn’t much left—then shut the window and turned. 

Brandon had the ability to make even the set of his shoulders resentful. The exasperation peaked—dwindled… Phillip couldn’t stand that Brandon made it impossible to stay angry at him. He walked over, set the bathrobe on the floor, and curled up under the sheets. When Brandon did not turn Phillip traced his fingers over the smooth pale skin at his spine. He leaned in, he kissed softly at it. At Brandon’s arms and the back of his neck and the span of his shoulders which were broad and powerful. 

“I’m sorry,” Phillip whispered. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Apologizing once again for something that he’d originally been angry about in the first place. He supposed he should be more irritated at that than he was. But it all just felt familiar. As familiar as when Brandon finally rolled over and curled his fingers around the back of Phillip’s skull and drew him forward— His mouth tasted of nicotine and faintly still also of his toothpaste. Lightly he licked at Phillip’s lower lip. It was small, apologetic. He reached between them to brush his fingers against the insides of Phillip’s thighs. The feeling—god, like nothing else. Shivery and glass sharp and so intense as to be nearly painful. He moved his hand a little upwards and Phillip whined against his lips. 

“You want to?” Brandon asked, the corner of his mouth curving upwards. 

“Can you be quiet enough?” Phillip asked, teasing—Brandon made a lot of interesting noises when they were fucking around—and Brandon pinched his side—

“Shut up.” When he kissed Phillip he bit down hard enough to bruise. Phillip arched up and grabbed at his hip, the blunt nails digging in. 

~

Two weeks later the phone rang while Phillip was on the back porch reading _The Grapes of Wrath_ and Brandon was shaving. Mrs. Shaw answered and a moment later called:

“Boys—it’s for you.”

Phillip rushed in and found Brandon already at the phone. He tilted the receiver a little so Phillip could hear too:

“Congratulations, Mr. Shaw. You and Mr. Morgan will be moving in on the twenty-second of October.”

It was a burst of something in his chest—color, hope, fire. Mrs. Shaw had gone outside to see about something her farmhands wanted and as such when Brandon hung up Phillip grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him forward and a little down. Their lips were dry and chapped and caught on each other, and they were both laughing when they pulled away. It occurred to Phillip later upon reflection that they’d found out about their apartment around the same time as they’d met at Somerville eight years prior. 

~

**vi.**

They moved everything in over the course of two days from both Brandon’s mother’s place and from Phillip’s aunt and uncle’s which was seven blocks over. Phillip’s aunt brought a celebratory bottle of champagne on the second day and left it on ice in the kitchen. He wished he could ask her if she thought his mother would be proud or at least if she’d have acknowledged him—it was doubtful. As it was all he could do was stand and allow both her and Mrs. Shaw to hug him separately, and then for his uncle to clap him once on the shoulder—then all three of them were gone in their cars and it was just Brandon and Phillip in their new apartment, sparsely decorated, with just the bare essentials of furniture (kitchen table, icebox, Mrs. Shaw’s piano, two beds, a long sofa underneath the window in the main area, the rug). They dragged the second bed down the hall from the guestroom to the master—they each had twins—and pushed them together beside the short bedside table set up there for a phone and a lamp. There was a window which looked out onto the roofs of buildings shorter than theirs; the sun had dipped below the tree line and everything was sort of burnt gold in the oncoming dusk. For a while they lay together not speaking—Phillip in the circle of Brandon’s arm, sharing his cigarette, eyes half-shut. Brandon’s fingers were in his hair stroking and Phillip turned and pressed his open mouth to Brandon’s skin. 

“I was thinking,” Brandon said, his voice a low tired murmur, “tomorrow we could go out shopping, we could see—we could buy things. For our place.” The way he said it sent a shiver up Phillip’s spine. _Our place._ Eight years…

“You gonna go domestic on me, Shaw?” he asked. Brandon huffed out a sound not quite a laugh; he stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray beside the bed and turned. By the time he got Phillip’s shirt and pants off they were both trembling. Phillip hooked his legs around Brandon’s waist—he’d gotten very good at letting his feet touch at the small of Brandon’s back where his spine dipped—and drew him in; they neither of them had to worry about anyone seeing them in the morning and Brandon sucked a mark into Phillip’s skin and Phillip dug his nails into Brandon’s shoulders. Afterwards having each lit up another cigarette they put on bathrobes and walked into the front of the house where they poured the champagne Phillip’s aunt had left and drank it laughing together on the oriental rug with their ankles just crossed. They slept wrapped around each other as they had on occasion in the dorms—Brandon’s head tucked into Phillip’s neck, his hand in loose clench about Phillip’s nightshirt. Then in the morning they dressed and headed into the city.

~

“Mr. Kentley’s here,” Phillip whispered, nudging lightly at Brandon’s shoulder with his own. 

Brandon did not look up from the desk lamp he was studying—running his fingers over the pale colored glass and the delicate chain. “What?” 

“David’s father,” Phillip said. “He’s right over there.” 

They had stopped at a furniture store the name of which was written over the front in gold script. Inside it was cool and quiet and for a time they’d been alone among shelves recently cleaned in beeswax and the prop books on them smelling of dust and closed air. Briefly Brandon had touched the backs of his fingers to Phillip’s—then the door tinkled open. Now in a different section of the store they stood looking at lamps and at candlesticks. And not fifty feet away David’s father was examining an armoire. 

A slow smile began to spread over Brandon’s face. He ran a thumb down the side of the lamp, possessive, like marking it for himself, and started forward. 

“Brandon—”

“I’m just going to say hello,” Brandon said. “I mean it’s only p-polite.”

“Not from you,” Phillip said, putting his own finger where Brandon’s had been. 

“R-Relax, would you?” Brandon rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s only David’s father.” And he walked forward with his even, laconic stride, and Phillip—hating himself, but curious all the same—followed. 

“Mr. Kentley!” Brandon said. When David’s father turned Phillip noticed he looked very small against the wide span of the chest. He pushed his glasses further up his nose and smiled a little, pleasant and confused. 

“Brandon,” he said. “How have you been, my boy? It’s been far too long.” With the hand not in his pocket he reached out and shook Brandon’s hand; his eyes slid to Phillip who was standing nearly at Brandon’s elbow and he added, “Oh, and Phillip. David hardly speaks of you anymore.” The way he said it made it sound as though for some reason he found this to be Phillip’s fault. 

“No, sir,” Phillip said. “We don’t, we never really see each other now since he’s been at Harvard.”

Brandon’s mouth twitched in a familiar way and Phillip set his jaw. But then shockingly all Brandon said was:

“I’ve been fine, Mr. Kentley. Phillip and I graduated a few months ago—”

“And now you’re going on to pursue your masters degrees,” said Mr. Kentley, the pleasant smile restored. Familiar ground, education, riches—he understood all that. Phillip pulled at his sleeves. 

“No,” Brandon said. “I’m t-taking a year. And Phillip’s playing concerts.”

“I’m going to,” Phillip corrected. 

“I see,” said Mr. Kentley, in the usual tone David had assumed when Phillip spoke of his music. Beside him Phillip felt Brandon’s shoulders tighten a little; he pressed his arm against his, casual nudge. _Let it go,_ he thought, _Brandon, please..._ And after a moment Brandon said: 

“Well, how’s David doing?” 

Mr. Kentley’s smile relaxed into something more genuine. Brandon was still tense, and Phillip knew that he couldn’t understand how someone as dull as Mr. Kentley could have such genuine affection for a son as equally dull as himself. When his own father and Phillip’s father had never so much as patted their shoulders... 

“He’s doing wonderfully,” Mr. Kentley said. “He’s been very successful since he transferred to Harvard.”

“Still in general studies?” Phillip asked, unable to keep the coldness from his voice entire. He felt Brandon’s eyes on him but didn’t dare look over. 

“Yes,” said Mr. Kentley, oblivious. “But he’s taking several psychology courses, and so of course his mother and I are very pleased. He’ll be graduating in the spring, you know. At the same time as his friend Kenneth Lawrence.” And then between his eyebrows formed a small furrow. 

Phillip glanced at Brandon, and noticed that he had seen it too. “Oh, are they still friends?” Brandon asked, casual. 

Mr. Kentley hesitated. “...Of course I don’t pry into my son’s life,” he said. “I’ve told Alice we have to let him grow up and get away from us.”

“Of course,” Brandon said. The eye roll in his voice was nearly tangible.

“But ever since David brought home that girl—”

Brandon’s whole body sort of tilted forward. “David has a girl now?” he asked, amused. Disbelieving. 

Mr. Kentley glanced at Phillip. “My,” he said after a moment. “You haven’t spoken in some time.”

“No,” Phillip said again. He thought of Rupert’s party: _I know all about what you like when you’re alone._ The angry and judgmental sneer...

“Well,” said Mr. Kentley, “David’s been going with a very lovely girl who graduated Radcliffe at the same time as you two finished Columbia. Her name is Janet Walker. Now the way David told it to me, it has all been very sudden. Only a few weeks. But she was with Kenneth for a long time before. So I don’t know how much the two of them are speaking now.” He sighed. “And Kenneth was always such a good friend to my boy...” 

Still Phillip could not look at Brandon’s face. Carefully he said, “We know Janet,” and Mr. Kentley said:

“Well, David has been very happy with her. She seems kind. Very sweet to myself and Alice.”

Brandon’s mouth was tense with his smile not reaching his eyes. “I’m glad David finally has a girl,” he said. “Janet’s...” He paused. Last month she’d written to congratulate them on the apartment in her fluid script she’d picked up at the magazine: _So you’ve finally gotten a place where you can swallow each other at night without the bedsprings waking Mother dearest._ Sardonic, cool... occasionally she reminded Phillip of Jordan Baker. Not anything like someone Henry and Alice Kentley would approve of for their son. 

“We should go,” Phillip said, into the silence. “We’ve got to get on with decorating our new place.”

For a moment Mr. Kentley looked as though perhaps David had told him his suspicions about the two of them. But it passed like water through a sieve and then he was smiling, shaking their hands again. “Very nice to see you both,” he said. To Phillip: “Call David. I’m sure he’d like to hear from you.” 

I’m sure he would, Phillip thought. 

“Thank you, sir,” he said, smiling tightly. Mr. Kentley turned away; the minute he’d gone Brandon’s charm, his own smile fell away. 

_“Janet?”_ As snarled and derisive as Phillip had thought. A sneer curling at his upper lip. “So she finally lowered herself enough. I wonder if she knows how much money he has.”

Phillip leaned against the armoire. Shifted his shoulders. 

“He’s wanted her for years,” Brandon said. He was trembling a little. “I hope he’s fucking satisfied.”

“Brandon—”

“Kenneth’s decent,” Brandon said. “David’s n-not, he d-doesn’t have the right to t-take Janet from him. H-He’s not w-worth anything.”

“I know,” Phillip said. Carefully he lay a hand on Brandon’s arm—the muscles beneath were tense. It wasn’t that David had taken Janet from Kenneth. It was that David had done something Brandon hadn’t wanted him to do. That David had somehow triumphed over Brandon’s control. It was the years of David being a nuisance, richer than Brandon, annoying, intrusive, incapable of pronouncing certain things, dull— 

“I want t-to kill him,” Brandon said. It was soft, vehement. “I r-really, really want to just—”

“I know,” Phillip said again. Wordlessly he removed his pack of Lucky Strikes and handed it to Brandon who took it; his hands shook over the opening, the rough nail of the thumb dragging over the cardboard. At last he removed one and lit it; in the reflection cast in dark glass on the cabinet behind them he looked like a film noir villain.

“Let’s just finish this up, huh?” Phillip murmured, and after a second Brandon nodded and turned to follow him. 

~

**vii.**

“How would you do it?”

“What?”

“You know what.” Brandon folded his fingers over Phillip’s where their hands rested between them. 

“Kill—”

“Y-Yes.”

Phillip sighed. “Brandon, we’ve had this conversation—”

“Just humor me.”

“Don’t I always?”

“Don’t be smart.” He kissed the side of his neck. “How would you do it? Come on.”

“Oh, god… I don’t know. I’d—chloroform him?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“…Telling you, Brandon, Jesus—”

“You’d chloroform David?”

“Yes.”

“Where on earth would you get chloroform?”

Phillip stared at the join of their hands; Brandon making lazy sweeps in the crescent of his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know. Uh. The hospital, maybe? I don’t know.”

“Too risky. And too boring.”

“Chloroforming someone is boring now?”

“For men like us? Yes!”

“Just to be clear, you mean—”

“I mean superior beings, Phillip.”

“Okay, okay.” He swept his own thumb across the back of Brandon’s hand. Placating. “Sorry.” A pause. “How would you do it, then?”

“I’d use something e-easier to get at than goddamn chloroform—”

“Would you drop the chloroform idea already?”

“It wasn’t my idea to begin with.” Teasing lightly at the waistband of his shorts now with his free hand. Phillip sighed; let his eyes fall half-shut. 

“You’re never gonna let that go, are you?”

“No.”

~

**viii.**

“Phillip?”

“Yes?”

“Have you given any more thought to it?”

Without turning from the pot on the stove: “To—”

“Killing David.”

“No more than usual…”

“Oh, so you do think about it.”

“I mean, Brandon, it’s, it’s one of your favorite subjects—”

“Yes, but even alone.”

“…Not as often as you do, I’m sure.”

“But often enough.”

“Often enough.” 

Brandon circled his waist with his arms. They were dangerously close to the fire; Phillip could feel the heat of it against his skin. But he suspected Brandon enjoyed that. “So he irritates you, too.”

“You know he does.”

“So…”

Pause. “So…?”

“So how would you do it?”

“I seem to remember that my last idea didn’t go over so well.”

“Well, it was fucking chloroform—”

“Shut up.” He turned enough to press a kiss to Brandon’s shoulder, which generally was an effective enough way of getting him to be quiet if only for a few seconds. “I notice you still haven’t put forward any other brilliant ideas yourself—”

“We could k-knock him over the head with something.”

“Like what?”

Brandon glanced at the candlestick holder on the dining room table. “Might be messy, though.”

“Any way of killing him would be messy.”

Pause. “Not _any…”_

Phillip glanced down. Brandon had put his hand on the steak in the sink. There had been two originally with it, and holding them together was a thin string. Phillip had cut it with the scissors in order to place one in the pan to cook medium for Brandon. The other he’d do well-done for himself. It was Mrs. Wilson’s weekend off. 

“A string from raw meat? Yeah, that’ll be really effective—”

“N-No.” Insistent. Frustrated. “Rope.”

“To gag him?”

“What on earth would that do?”

“I mean, I don’t know what else you plan to use the rope for—”

“To _strangle_ him, Phillip.”

Pause. “And who’s gonna be the one to do that?”

“Who do you think?”

“…You?”

The smile against the back of his neck was telling. “Oh, Phillip… you know I’m not the one who’s good with my hands.”

“You want me to strangle David with a rope.”

“It would certainly bring the element of surprise.”

“I think all murder would bring the element of surprise, Brandon—”

“Yet I don’t hear you saying no.”

“No…” Phillip turned the meat over in the pan. “You don’t.”

~

**ix.**

Always before now it had felt like a joke. Or at the very least like something not quite serious. When Brandon had first brought it up to Phillip two years previous he’d known that Brandon disliked David, maybe enough to do something to him. But for some reason it hadn’t really felt permanent… like perhaps one day Brandon would wake and Phillip would say, casually, _So, how about killing David?_ and Brandon would call him an idiot and kiss his forehead and go out to smoke on the balcony. But this—even their few and sporadic discussions since the day Phillip’s mother died had never felt like this. Like naming the tool. Like naming the method. Like going through the steps of it with their hands on each other’s bare waists in the shower, or quietly under the din of the motors as they walked down Fifth, or in the car on the way to Connecticut. 

Brandon had become proud of his strangulation idea—it would leave the least amount of fingerprints, he said, if they wore gloves the whole time, and didn’t touch David except to check for his pulse, and naturally if Phillip did it— He spent a lot of time touching Phillip’s hands. Watching obsessively, almost starved, as Phillip played the piano. Laughing when Phillip bruised him as they fucked. There was a strain of jealousy threading like rot in old meat through the pride in his eyes but it was faint, and Phillip of course was smart enough not to point it out. It felt in a way almost complimentary. 

Brandon remembered the story he’d loved so much at Somerville. The bride in the chest. When Phillip came home one evening from visiting his aunt and uncle Brandon was shaking—he gripped at Phillip’s hands the moment he walked through the door. He was stuttering so bad it took him several minutes to get out what he wanted to say:

“W-We should b-bury D-David’s body i-in a c-chest.”

“In a chest? Why?”

“A-As a c-coffin, of course.” 

Phillip unwound his scarf from his neck. “Where do you want to do this?”

“H-Here.”

“Here? In our apartment?”

Brandon glared at him, exasperated. They’d already established they were going to kill David here; it was private, it was just theirs. How they’d get him here was less certain… Phillip thought perhaps if he invited him for drinks. But he didn’t know why David would come to see Brandon, too. Except maybe to sneer at their life, at the piano in the corner, the obviously unused bedroom—

“Y-Yes, in our apartment. W-We’ll buy a chest, we’ll t-take it up here—”

“Brandon, that’s not going to work.”

“Well, it w-worked in the s-story.”

“That’s because that was fictional.” Phillip sat on the sofa; his hands were shaking, he didn’t usually smoke at his aunt and uncle’s. Brandon tugged his cigarette case out and handed it over staring out the window at the late evening settling over the skyline. “There’d be a smell if we left his body in a chest here. The neighbors would complain.”

“S-So we m-move him.”

“We’d have to do that after dark. It’s pretty conspicuous to just carry a body down six flights of stairs, Brandon…”

“D-David’s too g-good to just agree to c-come here after dark.”

“Well…” Phillip sighed; Brandon made everything so difficult. Yet it was in these moments he loved him the most. “We could, I guess we could invite him here in the afternoon…”

“If h-he comes into the city h-he’ll tell his p-parents.” Brandon rolled his eyes. “Y-You know how he is.”

“We could always say we were having a party.” Phillip took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Invite—you know, everyone. Including him, of course. So they’d know where he was.”

“Or where h-he’s supposed t-to be, anyway.” Brandon was smiling. Enjoying himself. It was that particular smile—Phillip remembered it from ninth grade, the first time Brandon had offered him a cigarette: _come on, come on, it’s not so bad after the first time…_

“What’ll we—we’ll just, what, we’ll leave the body in another room all afternoon?”

“Why?”

“Because—obviously, because we can’t kill him once everyone gets here—”

“Or—” It was ominous. And Brandon’s hand was on the inside of his knee, which of course made it even more difficult to concentrate. 

After a few seconds Phillip realized Brandon wanted him to ask. “Or what, Brandon.”

“Or w-we could kill him a-and leave the body in here, in the chest.” Brandon had drawn out a cigarette too; he was speaking quickly and staring at the wall opposite. “L-Let them stare at it and w-wonder where their p-precious David is—”

“Jesus, Brandon,” Phillip murmured. His heart had quickened a little beneath his ribs. He felt sick with how much he liked the idea, was nearly aroused by it. Brandon had always been fond of playing tricks, of guessing games and moving people like pieces on a chess board. It was dizzyingly close to how he’d messed with Rupert about their relationship. Yet it sent shivers up Phillip’s spine. Superiority and inferiority… 

“Y-You d-don’t like it?” Brandon asked. And Phillip sighed, and pressed his cigarette out into the ashtray. In the dirty orange light of dusk Brandon’s profile was cut sharp. He looked like an out-of-focus photograph. It was easy, it was so easy to just go along with him, with his infectious cruelty. To remember why, and how, and how quickly he’d fallen in love with him in the first place—

“I like it,” Phillip said, his voice soft against the inside of Brandon’s jaw. “But what if they figure it out?”

Brandon slid his hand up Phillip’s thigh. “T-That crowd?” His laugh was sharp. Irritated. “They won’t.”

~

Later, as they lay in bed together, the window flung open into the first warm night of spring, smoke trailing up into the cold distant stars:

“What’re we gonna do with the body?”

“B-Bury it at the f-farm.” He hesitated. “I-In the lake.”

“In our lake?”

“W-Where we’ve f-fucked before. Smoked cigarettes.” Brandon was laughing a little softly against Phillip’s neck where not half an hour previous he’d sucked a bruise into the skin; the pain of it was still sharp and aching dully with his heartbeat. “W-Wouldn’t he just l-love that.” 

David, resting among the silt and the weeds. The fish. The water. David, dead and buried beneath the same soil that Phillip had let run through his fingers one still summer night when Mrs. Shaw was away in Hartford and his room had been too stifling to breathe in. The same soil where lay buried years of cigarette ashes tapped out from Brandon’s clever fingers. Against his will he felt himself smiling too. Outside the window he heard the cacophony of car horns in the street. 

~

**x.**

They called Janet first. “Hello, ducks,” she said, laughing into the phone. In the distance Phillip heard a record playing Bing Crosby. “What is it, I’m about to go have my hair done.”

“Phillip and I are throwing a party,” Brandon said. “We want you to come.”

The line was silent. Phillip heard the snick of a lighter. Then Janet said:

“Hasn’t it been rather a long time for you to call me out of the blue like this and invite me to a party, chum?”

Brandon rolled his eyes. “Don’t be angry with me,” he said. “Phillip and I are just—we’ve been b-busy.”

“Yes, I’m sure. And every night your tongues between each other’s legs—”

“Do you want to come or don’t you?” 

“Well… who all will be there?”

Quickly Brandon scrawled on a piece of paper: _Don’t say Kenneth._ Phillip frowned at him but leaned towards the receiver and said, “Oh, us three… and David Kentley… we’re not sure who else yet.”

The change in her breathing at David’s name was small and Phillip doubted he’d have noticed were he not listening for it. Which of course he was. He pinched lightly at Brandon’s side. Brandon started smiling against his neck. 

“David Kentley?” she murmured. “You mean that strange boy I met with you at the USO dance all those years ago?” 

Brandon’s brow tightened: _why is she lying?_ Phillip could have said, because she knows you hate him, and she doesn’t need your commentary on it. But he just shrugged. “Yeah, him,” he said, and Janet made a noise of practiced neutrality. 

“I’ll come,” she said. “But you have to promise me you won’t just stay in the corner all evening and talk to each other. I know how you are.”

Once they’d hung up they called Kenneth, who agreed as well, sounding bemused. It occurred to Phillip as Kenneth talked that they had not spoken to him hardly since graduation. 

“How’s Princeton?” he asked, once the date of the party had been given and Brandon had, once again, written: _Don’t mention Janet_ on the same piece of paper. 

“Oh, it’s swell,” said Kenneth. 

“Let me guess, you’re actually studying,” said Brandon. 

Kenneth laughed. “Well, of course,” he said. There was nothing, no break in his voice, no falter in his sentences, to suggest he and Janet were split up. After Brandon set the receiver down Phillip said:

“Why don’t you want the two of them to know the other is coming?”

Brandon was frowning at his address book. Phillip could tell by his face he did not want to answer. Gently he pressed, “You know if neither of them mentioned the other the breakup must have been pretty bad.” And that Kenneth wouldn’t want Brandon gouging at the wounds. But he couldn’t make himself say that, either.

“Once David’s dead, Janet is going to n-need someone to steady her.” Brandon shrugged. “Why not Kenneth?”

“Janet doesn’t need steadying,” Phillip said.

Brandon’s mouth twitched. Phillip sighed. 

“You’re just playing more games, aren’t you,” he said. “You just can’t stand not being in control.”

Brandon’s hand moved a little in his, and Phillip who was watching his face as he always had saw the mask slip. The lines of tension in his forehead, about his mouth— Exasperation and affection. As he’d resigned himself to years ago. As it would be for the rest of his life. 

“It’s all right,” Phillip said. In its own Brandon way it was strangely sweet. He kissed his hand, the back of his wrist. Brandon smiled a little, settled—he flipped back two pages in his address book: _David Kentley,_ and underneath in small letters: _shit._ The number to his dorm at Harvard was dialed; when David came on the line Brandon handed the phone to Phillip who said:

“Hello, David. How have you been?”

“Phil?” David sounded surprised. “Hey, uh—hey, wow. What—I mean, I’ve been fine, how—gosh, it’s been forever, hasn’t it?”

A single unreturned call in November. Phillip feeling guilty after their meeting with Mr. Kentley at the furniture store. He hadn’t tried again since.

“I’m doing okay,” Phillip said. Inside his chest he was shaking a little. Last week they’d bought a long heavy piece of rope at the hardware store—in his mind he could see it where he knew it sat waiting like some possessed augury in the kitchen drawer. He imagined himself looping it around David’s neck—the thick cords of his veins would stand out, the muscles straining— Killing David would be nothing like killing those chickens. Nothing even like leading the pigs to slaughter in Oklahoma. “Listen,” he said. “I’m calling to, to invite you… well, where are you going to be the second weekend in May?”

A pause, light rustling of papers. “I’m supposed to be here,” he said, “studying for finals, but… well, that weekend is cleared. Why? Where are you going?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Phillip said; Brandon laughed gently against his palm. “I want you to come to my, to mine and Brandon’s apartment for a party that Saturday.”

“Oh… uh, is Brandon going to be there?”

Phillip sighed. “Yes… but we’re having other people as well. You won’t have to talk to him.” 

David made a noise. “I suppose I could come into town that weekend and see my parents—”

Brandon started laughing harder, and Phillip had to clamp his hand over his mouth. In the trees outside the wind was moving—

“Okay, so it’s settled then,” Phillip said into the receiver. “Second weekend of May.” He gave the address and the phone number. “The party’s going to start about five.”

“Okay,” said David. “Thanks, Phillip.”

Then Brandon’s hand was curling around and underneath Phillip’s, tugging the receiver away from him. He’d lit a cigarette in the interim of conversation and as he held the phone to his ear he crossed one ankle over his knee, blew out a long blue-gray column of smoke. 

“And David?” he said. “Come early, would you?”

**_Spring 1950_ **

**_Austria_ **

“You don’t smoke here.”

Phillip turned, startled; his nerves as always were shot and Brandon had curled a hand around his arm as they stood together outside the concert hall. Inside he could hear his accompanying orchestra tuning up. “What?”

“This my establishment,” said the owner. “This nice place. You don’t smoke here. Outside.”

Brandon tensed; Phillip knew in a moment he would start fighting. He’d get thrown out, and Phillip couldn’t play unless Brandon was in the front row, reassuring and solid. He rested his fingers lightly in the crook of Brandon’s arm; he murmured:

“It’s okay, let’s just go.” And Brandon must have felt how hard he was shaking because after a moment he shrugged, flippant. He sneered at the owner, detached himself from the wall. Together he and Phillip walked down the short corridor and out into the bitter March wind to finish their cigarettes.


End file.
